In a report released by Meta on the 15th of December, Meta warned that the use of spyware to target people, particularly journalists and activists indiscriminately, is still a persistent threat. This is due to the fact that surveillance-for-hire companies are consistently adapting and changing tactics in their spyware to evade efforts to shut down attempts to spy on users.
Meta said that one case led them to removing 100 accounts on Facebook and Instagram linked to a company called “Avalanche”, which is based in Russia. The Facebook parent company said that Avalanche had sold access to a platform that allows spying across the internet to put users in harm’s way.
Nathaniel Gleicher, the head of security policy at Meta, said “Our key goal is to do everything we can to protect people. So, we share our insights with our industry peers. Twitter is going through a transition right now and most of the people we’ve dealt with have moved on. As a result, we have to wait and see what they announce in these threat areas,” Gleicher told reporters about the Meta report.
“These companies are part of a sprawling industry that provides intrusive software tools and surveillance services indiscriminately to any customer – regardless of who they target or the human rights abuses they might enable,” Meta said in its report. “In a sense, this industry ‘democratises’ these threats, making them available to government and non-government groups that otherwise wouldn’t have these capabilities to cause harm.”
