Facebook explains how it blocks ‘billions’ of attempts to scrape user data daily

Facebook might be the world’s most popular and commercially successful social networking service, but the platform is no stranger to reports of user data leaks, breaches and privacy violations. Last month, we learnt that the data of over 530 million users had been previously scraped from the site, then posted online. Facebook decided it would not inform any of its users about the breach, a move that attracted widespread criticism.

The social networking platform on Wednesday explained on its blog how it is going about trying to block scraping of data on its site. The company starts off by drawing a distinction between authorised scraping,