San Francisco: Facebook-owned Instagram has banned a San Francisco-based company from its platform on charges of improper user-data collection.
Called Hyp3r, the start-up scraped public data such as users' physical locations, profile information, and photos to serve better-targeted ads. Information collected by Hyp3r also includes data stored in Instagram Stories that is content designed to disappear after 24 hours.
On detecting foul play, Instagram sent a cease-and-desist letter to Hyp3r, CNET reported on Wednesday.
"Hyp3r's actions were not sanctioned and violate our policies, as a result, we've removed them from our platform," the report quoted an Instagram spokesperson as saying.
A portion of what Hyp3r is scraping comes from Instagram's Location pages which highlight images from public accounts that have been geotagged and are visible publicly anyway.
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Facebook has been under scrutiny since the revelation last year that consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica had misused Facebook users data in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election.
On Tuesday, identifying a case of fraud, social networking giant Facebook sued two app developers to click injection scam that infected smartphones with malware.
