London - Impact International for Human Rights Policies called for strict and effective measures to ensure that privacy violations and spying on the accounts of hundreds of thousands of Facebook and Instagram users are stopped and that the Israeli company involved in this is held accountable.
ImpACT International said in a statement on Sunday, January 15, that it followed with great concern and disapproval what Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, revealed regarding the Israeli surveillance company Voyager Labs that spied on hundreds of thousands of users on Facebook and Instagram via fake accounts.
The London-based think tank followed what the Guardian newspaper revealed of a lawsuit filed by Meta against the Israeli monitoring company Voyager Labs for using surveillance software that relied on fake accounts to scrape data from more than 600,000 Facebook and Instagram users.
The lawsuit filed by Meta indicates that Facebook deleted 38,000 fake accounts created by the Israeli company, which has offices in the US, the United Kingdom, Israel, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. In addition, the suit says that Voyager designed its software to hide its presence from Meta and sold and licensed for profit the data it obtained.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and UNESCO must take adequate measures to ensure that Israeli companies adhere to human rights principles, particularly the right to privacy.
According to the lawsuit, the Israeli company also used a monitoring program that used fake accounts to collect data from Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Telegram, Facebook and Instagram users.
This data included posts, likes, friends, photos, comments, and information from groups and pages.
ImpACT International expressed its concern that this espionage is part of an organized campaign behind which Israeli spying companies stand, providing services of this kind to security services in Israeli and other countries with a bad record of human rights violations.
The think-tank recalled what the Israeli company Pegasus had previously done, which hacked dozens of phones of journalists, politicians, and human rights activists, as part of security services whose outputs represented a severe threat to the life and security of the hacked personalities.
It urged the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and UNESCO to take adequate measures to ensure that Israeli companies adhere to human rights principles, particularly the right to privacy.
And finally it stressed that the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights oblige businesses to respect human rights and avoid causing or contributing to any harm to users and that they are responsible for redressing the harm if it occurs by providing direct remedies, including the establishment of grievance mechanisms that work to redress users and limit harm inflicted upon them.