The FBI wants to build a data dragnet on Facebook

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

On Wednesday, Rob Price published a nice scoop about a San Francisco marketing agency that had been slurping up millions of public posts from Instagram and selling it to clients. As a side effect, the company — which is called HYP3R, because San Francisco — took countless Instagram stories that were supposed to disappear after 24 hours and effectively made them permanent, storing them in a database and then renting it out to brands.

All of this is against Instagram’s terms of service, though the company didn’t notice it until Price brought it to their attention. I’m told that the practice was not particularly uncommon — one tipster told me yesterday that many marketing tech companies sell services that let brands see what people are...

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