Court rules against Meta in Bright Data scraping case
“The Facebook and Instagram Terms do not bar logged-off scraping of public data; perforce it does not prohibit the sale of such public data. Therefore, the Terms cannot bar Bright Data’s logged-off scraping activities,” said U.S. District Judge Edward Chen
A federal judge has rejected Meta's (formerly Facebook) motion for summary judgment against the Israel-based web scraper, Bright Data. Meta had filed a lawsuit against Bright Data, alleging a breach of Facebook and Instagram's terms of service through data scraping, despite Meta previously using the Israeli startup to scrape data from other websites. Meta contended that Bright Data utilized automation software to extract users' profile information, followers, and posts, subsequently selling the acquired data and providing tools to others for undetected scraping.
Bright Data countered, asserting that its services allowed users to search for publicly available internet data, maintaining that Meta's terms of service were only violated if evidence demonstrated data scraping while logged into a Meta account. Senior U.S. District Judge Edward Chen ruled in favor of Bright Data, emphasizing that Meta's breach of contract claims necessitated proof of data scraping during an active Meta account session. This legal decision holds significance in the ongoing landscape of web scraping disputes, contributing clarity to the interpretation of terms of service in such instances.
“The Facebook and Instagram Terms do not bar logged-off scraping of public data; perforce it does not prohibit the sale of such public data. Therefore, the Terms cannot bar Bright Data’s logged-off scraping activities,” said U.S. District Judge Edward Chen.
“When Meta approached us with a demand to stop allowing our customers to collect public data (scraping) from Facebook and Instagram, we decided that the right thing to do was to refuse and resolve this in court because public data should remain public,” said Or Lenchner, CEO of Bright Data. “Despite many efforts by tech giants to exclusively control public information on the internet, common sense prevailed. Public information is public. This has always been our claim, and we are very happy about the decision of the court that supports this approach. Bright Data, as the leading web data collection company, will continue to fight for the basic right to free access to public information on the web.”
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Bright Data says it only scrapes publicly available data, which is visible to anyone without a log-in. “Meta has made the information Bright Data scrapes available to anyone on the Internet and Bright Data’s technology allows organizations to access data to provide information for research and business decisions,” the company explained.
Bright Data is also facing a similar lawsuit filed by X Corp., formerly known as Twitter. X claims that the company extracted and sold records of millions of the social media platform’s users in violation of the terms of service.
