Facebook Says Russian Firms 'Scraped' Data, Some for Facial Recognition

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times:
On the same day Facebook announced that it had carried out its biggest purge yet of American accounts peddling disinformation, the company quietly made another revelation: It had removed 66 accounts, pages and apps linked to Russian firms that build facial recognition software for the Russian government. Facebook said Thursday that it had removed any accounts associated with SocialDataHub and its sister firm, Fubutech, because the companies violated its policies by scraping data from the social network. 'Facebook has reason to believe your work for the government has included matching photos from individuals' personal social media accounts in order to identify them,' the company said in a cease-and-desist letter to SocialDataHub that was dated Tuesday and viewed by The New York Times...
As Facebook is taking a closer look at its own products amid increasing scrutiny and public outcry, it is increasingly finding examples of companies that have been exploiting its global social network for questionable ends.... Artur Khachuyan, the 26-year-old chief executive of SocialDataHub and Fubutech, said in an interview Friday that Fubutech scraped data from the web, particularly Google search and the Russian search engine Yandex, to build a database of Russian citizens and their images that the government can use for facial recognition. 'We don't know exactly what they do with it,' he said.... At one point in a 30-minute phone interview, he said the Russian Defense Ministry was a client but later said he could not name Fubutech's government clients.
The two Russian companies have been around for over four years, 'relying in part on Facebook data,' the Times reports.
'At the top of the SocialDataHub's website, there is a single line: 'We know everything about everybody.''

Read more of this story at Slashdot.