A SpokesFacebook said in a statement that SocialDataHub, which has previously supplied analytical services to the Russian government, had violated its terms of use.

“As part of our efforts to protect people’s security, we have recently removed SocialDataHub’s accounts... because they were scraping people’s information”, it said.

“This is a violation of our terms of service, and we have disabled more than 66 of SDH’s accounts, profiles, pages, and apps from our service. We expect to find and disable more.”

The outfit was set up by Russian businessman Artur Khachuyan, in 2015. It insists it has not violated any laws or Facebook’s rules. He said it had received a complaint from Facebook and was drawing up an official response.

The Facebook complaint claims SocialDataHub and Fubutech, a company also set up by Khachuyan, are amongst other things providing state services with the means to identify people by analysing social media users’ photographs.

In the letter, Facebook demands that SocialDataHub stop collecting user data and present a report by 12 October detailing the data that has been collected by the company.

It requested information about the parties to which SocialDataHub had sold or handed out data.