Facebook sues South Korean firm Rankwave over data misuse

Facebook has now filed a lawsuit in California state court against Rankwave, a South Korean data analytics company that ran apps on its platform.

The lawsuit alleged that Rankwave abused Facebook's developer platform's data and refused to cooperate with a mandatory compliance audit and request to delete the data.

"Facebook was investigating Rankwave's data practices in relation to its advertising and marketing services.

"Rankwave failed to cooperate with our efforts to verify their compliance with our policies, which we require of all developers using our platform," Jessica Romero, Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation said in a statement on late Friday.

She added that Facebook has already suspended apps and accounts associated with Rankwave. "The lawsuit asks the court to enforce the basic cooperation terms that Rankwave agreed to in exchange for the opportunity to operate apps on the platform," Romero noted.


According to court documents filed in California on Friday, Facebook is accusing Rankwave of using at least 30 different apps to "track and analyse" comments and likes on Facebook pages.

Rankwave also had a consumer app that, after gaining the user's consent, would track the popularity of that user's posts. The app would calculate a "social influence score", Facebook said.

However, the social network said it had information that since 2014, Rankwave had been using data gathered by its apps "for its own business purposes, which include providing consulting services to advertisers and marketing companies".

In its lawsuit, Facebook accuses Rankwave of ignoring repeated requests to open itself up to an audit and provide evidence relating to data it had allegedly obtained. Facebook wants a judge to force Rankwave to take those steps, as well as pay an unspecified amount in damages.

Facebook said the data company had harmed its "reputation" and "public trust". Facebook said it began investigating Rankwave, which has remained active on the network until last month, in June 2018.