Meta Platforms has sued an Israel-based web scraping firm called Bright Data for scraping data from its Facebook and Instagram websites – even though Meta paid Bright Data to scrape data from other websites.
This legal battle kicked off earlier last month when the two companies in fact sued each other. Meta two months prior had sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bright Data demanding that it stop collecting what the scraping firm characterizes as public data. Bright Data disagreed with Meta's interpretation of its data collection rights and the two then headed to court – Meta seeking to halt Bright Data's data harvesting, and Bright Data seeking declaratory judgment from the court that gathering publicly accessible data from Facebook's website is lawful.
Bright Data filed its
complaint [PDF] under seal, having been unable to get an answer from Meta about maintaining confidentiality. But Meta's own
complaint [PDF], via its accompanying exhibits, ended up disclosing the information Bright Data had redacted, a message from Bright Data citing the business relationship between the two firms: "Meta has long been a valued client of our proxy and scraping services for at least the last six years."
www.theregister.com
