Did you know Meta’s Lawsuit Against Bright Data Just Got Hindered By This Court Ruling
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.
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