Voyager, as Expected, Seeks Dismissal of Meta Data-Scraping Lawsuit
Voyager Labs seeks an order dismissing Meta’s data-scraping complaint for failure to state a claim on which relief may be granted, said its motion Thursday (docket 4:23-cv-00154) in U.S. District Court for Northern California. It asked for a June 1 in-person motion hearing before U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam in Oakland.
Voyager had telegraphed its plans to file a motion to dismiss in an April 11 joint case management statement with Meta (see 2304120002). It denies Meta allegations it created and used more than 38,000 fake Facebook user accounts and its surveillance software to scrape more than 600,000 Facebook users’ viewable profile information. Voyager said it believes Meta’s complaint “was not borne out of genuine concern about the alleged data scraping” but rather “as part of a public relations campaign.”
Meta’s complaint asserts a single claim for breach of contract against Voyager for violating the Facebook and Instagram terms and conditions that prohibit data scraping, said the motion to dismiss. To satisfy its “pleading obligations” under Rule 8 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Meta “must plead facts from which a reasonable factfinder could plausibly conclude” that Meta and Voyager formed a contract “through acts of mutual assent,” it said. Meta “pleads no such facts” but instead relies on “two improper pleading tactics,” it said.
Meta invokes a “hodgepodge” of more than a half-dozen sets of terms, guidelines, rules, standards and policies that allegedly govern everyone who has ever used Facebook or Instagram, said Voyager’s motion. But Meta attaches no contract to its complaint, and instead quotes from undated versions of what Meta alleges are Facebook and Instagram's terms, it said. The complaint doesn’t put Voyager on notice of what the essential terms of the allegedly breached contracts are, whether those terms have changed over time or how long the alleged contracts were in effect, it said. That’s “inadequate to plausibly plead the existence of a contract,” it said.
Meta's “theory of contract formation” appears to be based on the finding Facebook and Instagram have billions of users, with Voyager allegedly one of them, said the motion. But the complaint doesn’t allege how Voyager “manifested assent to any such a contract, which necessarily would have been an online adhesion contract,” it said.
Meta alleges Voyager, at various points over an eight-year span, created and used multiple Facebook and Instagram accounts, said the motion. But even if that were true, it’s “insufficient to plausibly allege formation of an online adhesion contract,” it said. “Mere use of a website, without more,” isn’t “generally sufficient to manifest assent to the terms of such a contract,” it said.
Meta doesn’t say whether the alleged contracts “are browsewrap, clickwrap, or something else,” said the motion. “Unlike an action for breach of a typical bilateral, executed contract,” Voyager “may never have even seen the particular terms that allegedly constitute the contracts in question,” it said. Meta's complaint therefore fails to place Voyager “on reasonable notice of the basis for its breach claim, which compels dismissal,” it said.
A second improper pleading tactic is that Meta wrongly “conflates” Voyager with its subsidiaries, arguing it should be held responsible for the activities of its subsidiaries as if Voyager itself was the actor under an “alter ego theory,” said the motion. That’s “the entirety” of Meta's alter ego allegations, it said. Alter ego is an “exceptional theory of liability” that requires a plaintiff to plead facts showing “such unity of interest among multiple corporations that their separate personalities no longer exist,” it said. Meta also is required to show “inequitable results if traditional corporate separateness is observed,” it said: “Meta has not met these requirements.”