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US social media giant Facebook Inc. Thursday filed a lawsuit against a mobile analytics company for illegally collecting private information of users from social media platforms.

Jessica Romero, director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation at Facebook, said Facebook brought the federal lawsuit in a California court against oneAudience LLC for improperly obtaining user data from its platform and other Internet companies including Google and Twitter.

New Jersey-based oneAudience paid app developers to install a malicious software in their apps to steal user information such as their login name, email address, geographical location, time zone, Facebook ID and even gender, a court document showed.

"Security researchers first flagged oneAudience's behavior to us as part of our data abuse bounty program," Romero said.

In November 2019, Facebook took technical ad legal enforcement measures against oneAudience, including disabling accounts, sending a cease and desist letter and notifying users of comprise risks.

Romero said Facebook's lawsuit, filed at the US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, represents the company's "efforts to protect people and increase accountability of those who abuse the technology industry and users."

Facebook said oneAudience refused to cooperate with it, and asked the court to order the defendant to pay punitive damages to the world's largest social network.