Facebook owner Meta uncovers half a dozen private surveillance firms, mostly Israeli, saying all of them collectively targeted nearly 50,000 users across its platforms in more than 100 countries.Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc has called out half a dozen private surveillance companies for hacking or other abuses, accusing them in a report of collectively targeting some 48,000 people across its platforms.
Meta’s report on Thursday said it was suspending roughly 1,500, mostly fake accounts run by seven organisations across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Meta said users in more than 100 countries were targeted.
Meta did not provide a detailed explanation of how it identified the surveillance firms, but it operates some of the world’s biggest social and communications networks and regularly touts its ability to find and remove malicious actors from its platforms.
“While these ‘cyber mercenaries’ often claim that their services only target criminals and terrorists, our months-long investigation concluded that targeting is in fact indiscriminate and includes journalists, dissidents, critics of authoritarian regimes, families of opposition members and human rights activists,” Meta’s report said.
The company’s fight with the spy firms comes amid a wider move by American tech companies, US lawmakers, and President Joe Biden’s administration against purveyors of digital espionage services, notably the Israeli spyware company NSO Group, which was blacklisted earlier this month following weeks of revelations about how its technology was being deployed against civil society.
Meta is already suing NSO in US court.
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