Meta filed a lawsuit against the Israeli tech firm Bright Data last year, claiming that it was illegally scraping data from Facebook as well as Instagram. The suit alleged that the data harvesting practices that Bright Data was taking part in were a violation of Meta’s terms of service, but in spite of the fact that this is the case, a court has ended up ruling in the Israeli firm’s favor. This ruling stated that Meta has failed to provide the appropriate amount of evidence to back up the claims that it is making at this current point in time.
With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Meta itself has utilized Bright Data’s services in the past. It hired the firm to scrape e-commerce data from various websites, and this practice continued right up until the lawsuit ended up being filed. It bears mentioning that the firm might be collecting data from minors which would constitute a legal violation, although this isn’t part of the court proceedings that are going on right now.
Bright Data’s retort to Meta’s allegations is that it only participated in scraping publicly available data, and since Meta hasn’t yet provided sufficient proof of non-public data being acquired, this lawsuit might not go where the tech company wants it to. The evidence that Meta did bring to the table consisted of a data set containing 615 million Instagram data records, which Bright Data was selling for around $860,000. However, Meta failed to prove that this data could only be accessed by entering log in credentials in any way, shape or form.
Other claims included Meta stating that Bright Data bypassed CAPTCHAs to get to the data, but the court refuted this by saying it’s not quite the same as bypassing password protection. It remains to be seen where the case will go from here on out, but for now Meta is having a hard time proving that Bright Data did anything to violate the terms of use, although this might change in the future.
Photo: Digital Information World - AIgen/HumanEdited
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With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Meta itself has utilized Bright Data’s services in the past. It hired the firm to scrape e-commerce data from various websites, and this practice continued right up until the lawsuit ended up being filed. It bears mentioning that the firm might be collecting data from minors which would constitute a legal violation, although this isn’t part of the court proceedings that are going on right now.
Bright Data’s retort to Meta’s allegations is that it only participated in scraping publicly available data, and since Meta hasn’t yet provided sufficient proof of non-public data being acquired, this lawsuit might not go where the tech company wants it to. The evidence that Meta did bring to the table consisted of a data set containing 615 million Instagram data records, which Bright Data was selling for around $860,000. However, Meta failed to prove that this data could only be accessed by entering log in credentials in any way, shape or form.
Other claims included Meta stating that Bright Data bypassed CAPTCHAs to get to the data, but the court refuted this by saying it’s not quite the same as bypassing password protection. It remains to be seen where the case will go from here on out, but for now Meta is having a hard time proving that Bright Data did anything to violate the terms of use, although this might change in the future.
Read next: Apple Registers Early Win in Battle Against Pegasus Spyware Maker
