Facebook Sues Website Owner Who Scraped 100,000 Instagram Profiles

Facebook has filed another lawsuit against a developer who misused its platform. The company said it’s suing Ensar Sahinturk, who allegedly ran a network of cloned Instagram sites using information scraped from public profiles.

According to Facebook, Sahinturk, who is a Turkish national, scraped details from thousands of public Instagram profiles in order to create his sites. “Sahinturk used automation software to scrape public profiles, photos and videos from more than 100,000 Instagram accounts without Instagram’s permission and in violation of our Terms,” Facebook writes in a statement. “He then published this data on a network of clone sites, where anyone could enter an Instagram username to view Instagram user profiles, pictures, videos, stories, hashtags and locations.”