Bright data emerges victorious as courts sides with web scraping against Meta

Meta's legal case with Israeli tech firm Bright Data has ended in defeat, as the court ruled against the tech giant's claim of a "breach of contract" due to Bright Data's data scraping activities on Facebook and Instagram. Meta had alleged that Bright Data's data harvesting infringed upon its terms of service, to which Bright Data had previously agreed by maintaining accounts on Meta's platforms. However, the court found Meta's evidence lacking, asserting that Meta failed to demonstrate that Bright Data had scraped anything beyond publicly accessible data.

Lawsuit against Bright Data from Meta

What makes this lawsuit all the more intriguing is the revelation that Meta had once been a paying customer of Bright Data, employing their web scraping services to collect data from e-commerce websites for the purpose of building brand profiles on its own platforms. In essence, Meta had previously been a client of Bright Data before choosing to take them to court, albeit for a different objective. Additionally, Bright Data faced allegations of gathering personal information about minors from Facebook and Instagram, as reported by Bloomberg last year.

Breaching the contract with Meta

The court's refusal to grant Meta's motion for partial summary judgment on the breach of contract claim was based on Meta's inability to provide substantial evidence that Bright Data had scraped non-public data—data not shielded behind login screens or password protection. Rather than presenting conclusive proof, Meta showcased an example of a dataset offered for sale by Bright Data, encompassing 615 million records of Instagram user data with a price tag of $860,000. Meta contended that Bright Data had been amassing and selling extensive quantities of user data, like this dataset, including details such as Instagram usernames, IDs, countries, post counts, bios, hashtags, followers, posts, profile images, business categories, emails, and more. Nonetheless, Meta failed to establish that such data could only be obtained through access to user accounts.

In another intriguing instance of Bright Data's activities, Meta attempted to present evidence suggesting that the firm possessed non-public information. However, the court ultimately ruled against this line of argument, contending that the data's accessibility may have been public at an earlier juncture, such as before a user modified their privacy settings, introducing a layer of complexity into the matter.

“Bright Data” had an access to various options

Meta contended that Bright Data had utilized tools to navigate around access barriers, including CAPTCHAs, thus implying that Bright Data had engaged in data collection "behind authentication barriers." The court, however, refuted this claim, making a clear distinction by emphasizing that the utilization of automated programs to circumvent CAPTCHAs differs substantially from accessing a password-protected website. The court was keen to underline that Meta should indeed grasp this fundamental disparity.

Even though Meta's anti-scraping investigative team had uncovered indications that Bright Data had promoted a "scraping browser" designed to streamline the process of logging in and emulating various user actions to facilitate automated data collection, the court remained unconvinced that this constituted substantial evidence of logged-in scraping in the present case.