In an effort to disrupt an industry that has made it easier and easier to monitor individuals discreetly online, Facebook’s parent company Meta has banned at least seven businesses off the platform during the past year that engaged in surveillance-for-hire operations.
Facebook Head of Security Policy Nathaniel Gleicher urges democracies worldwide to step up efforts to criminalize these types of businesses and activities. “No single company can tackle a society-wide challenge like this alone.”
Fighting surveillance operations on the platform has been a top concern for Meta for a while. It has an ongoing case against NSO Group, the well-known Israeli spyware vendor, saying that after using its surveillance software against 1,400 users of WhatsApp, which Meta owns, the firm broke federal anti-hacking law. NSO Group denies the accusations and has made unsuccessful attempts to get the lawsuit dismissed.
In a study released on Thursday along with a policy paper outlining 13 proposals for taking on the surveillance-for-hire industry, Meta detailed its most recent activities:
- the sale of surveillance software should be prohibited;
- organizations should be created to assist victims in pursuing legal action; and
- export control lists should be used to restrict the accessibility of monitoring technologies.
The company’s first report on surveillance-for-hire, which was published last year, is built on Meta’s research. According to that study, Meta had disabled seven separate surveillance-for-hire companies’ access to its internet infrastructure, which may have been used to target 50,000 Facebook and Instagram users.
The Biden administration is preparing to issue an executive order next year intended to limit the use of spyware by American intelligence services as Meta makes its recommendations.
The European Parliament is looking at NSO Group’s Pegasus software, which Meta publicly testified about earlier this year.