Meta drops lawsuit against web scraping company Bright Data that sold millions of Instagram records

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Meta has dropped its lawsuit against Israeli web scraping company Bright Data after losing key claims in the case a few weeks ago. The social networking giant has a history of waging war against companies that collect data from its websites and apps, and Bright Data is one of the latest companies to face legal attack. However, a court recently ruled in BrightData’s favor on a breach of contract claim, saying Meta had not presented sufficient evidence to prove it scraped anything other than public data. Rather than continue with the lawsuit, Meta dropped the case, according to court filings.

What makes this case particularly interesting, and not just a case of web scraping, is that Meta is a former Bright Data customer. In effect, the company provided Meta with e-commerce website data to build brand profiles on its platform. But when Bright Data scraped Meta’s own data, the company sued.

Last month, the court granted partial summary judgment for breach of contract, finding that Meta did not present sufficient evidence that Bright Data scraped. private Data — refers to the data behind a login screen or password-protected page. The lawsuit alleges how much user data third-party companies like Bright Data collect and sell that data collection to other companies, where they conduct market research, marketing, ad tech, AI training, and more.

In the lawsuit, Mehta brought to court an example of BrightData’s web-scraping efforts, including the sale of a massive dataset containing 615 million records of Instagram data for $860,000. The dataset included fields such as user’s name, ID, country, number of posts, bio, hashtags, followers, posts, profile image, business category, and email. However, the court did not believe that Meta presented sufficient evidence to show that the data could only have been collected by logged-in user accounts.

In another example, Mehta tried to prove that Bright Data owned nonpublic information, but because the information could have been publicly accessible, the court held that BrightData owned private information, as Mehta claimed. , said this also cannot be used to prove login scraping. At an earlier point in time when the scraping occurred.

Additionally, the court disagreed with Meta’s opinion that using automated tools to circumvent access restrictions, such as CAPTCHAs, is the same as accessing a “password-protected website.”

And despite Meta’s discovery that Bright Data advertised a “scraping browser” that automated website logins to facilitate login data collection, the court ruled that Meta He said he has no evidence to prove that data scraping was used in any specific incident.

Finally, the court found that there was no evidence that Bright Data used its Facebook and Instagram accounts for scraping, and therefore it could not be held liable under Meta’s terms of service or other legal policies to which users agreed. said. At the time of the ruling, Meta said it was evaluating its next steps in the ongoing litigation.

On Friday, February 23, 2024, Meta moved to dismiss the remaining claims in its lawsuit against the web scraping company (tortious interference claims) “without prejudice,” following an earlier order granting summary judgment on February 23, 2024. waived the right to appeal. Bright Data in favor of breach of contract claim.

This is a rare defeat for Meta against the web scraper industry, and Meta regularly files lawsuits to stop this practice.

In many other cases, meta prevails. This also includes the October 2022 settlement of lawsuits against two other companies, Israel-based BrandTotal Ltd. and Delaware-based Unimania Inc., which will allow the companies to move forward with their Facebook and Instagram data collection. agreed to a permanent injunction prohibiting scraping. Both companies also had to pay Meta a “significant sum of money,” the tech giant said. Prior to this, Meta settled with scraping service Massroot8 in 2020. And in 2022, it sued the operator of the clone site and a company called Octopus, a U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese state-run tech company that provided scraping services. Meta won that case as well, and the court issued a permanent injunction halting the company’s data collection operations.

Last year, Meta sued another scraping-for-rental company, Voyager Labs, and that lawsuit is still ongoing.

BrightData says the lawsuit was not dismissed because the parties reached a settlement because it did not have an agreement with Meta and would not make any changes to Meta’s actions. In other words, the company believes that Meta’s terms do not apply to scraping public information while logged out of an account, and that this lawsuit supports its right to do so. But this also means that when taking a web scraper to court, it not only shows that Meta has Meta’s data to sell, that it runs a business that provides data scraping, but also that Meta does illegal scraping. It also shows that we just need to provide better evidence of the

“This concession by Meta is a pivotal moment for BrightData and the web scraping community. We are thrilled with the outcome of this case and solidifying public information is just that, public information.” CEO Ol Lentiner said in an email with TechCrunch. “Bright Data remains committed to making public web data freely accessible to everyone. The Internet is for the benefit of everyone, and no single organization or individual owns the Internet. “We should not claim that we are,” he added.