Facebook suffers big loss in lawsuit against data-scraping company

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One year after Meta sued a data-scraping company, a federal judge this week threw out Meta’s breach-of-contract claim because the defendant obtained only public data from Facebook and Instagram.

Meta sued Bright Data in January 2023, making claims of breach of contract and tortious interference with contract. Bright Data is an Israeli company that collects data from various websites and offers related products to businesses.

“Bright Data concedes that it was bound to Meta’s Terms while it had Facebook and Instagram accounts, and that it sells data collected from Facebook and Instagram,” US District Judge Edward Chen wrote in a ruling issued Tuesday. “However, even viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the non-moving party (Meta)… 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.”