Meta Platforms paid contractor for years to scrape data from other websites

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Meta Platforms paid contractor for years to scrape data from other websites

Meta Platforms Inc. paid a contractor for years to scrape data from other websites, while publicly condemning the practice and suing companies that pulled data from their own social-media platforms.

The social media giant filed a lawsuit in a California court case in which he sued Israel-based data collection company Bright Data for harvesting and selling information drawn from Facebook and Instagram.

It is an ironic turn of events for the company: Email correspondence between the two businesses appears to confirm that Meta has a years-long professional relationship with the data-scraping outfit. Bright Data provides a wide range of services, including scraping profile information, as well as likes, follows, and comments from social media platforms such as TikTok and Twitter, and e-commerce sites like Amazon, eBay and Walmart.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Andy Stone said Meta had paid Bright Data to gather data from e-commerce sites in order to build brand profiles on Meta platforms, but they wouldn't say which sites were scrapped. Meta used Bright Data to find harmful websites and phishing operations, he said.

Since 2021, Meta has been a victim of a number of lawsuits against companies that scrape data from its platform. In addition to Bright Data, it includes US-based Voyager Labs, Octopus, a US subsidiary of a Chinese enterprise company, and BrandTotal Ltd. In January, Meta published the latest in a series of blog posts about how it was leading the fight against scraping-for-hire. Stone said that the collection of data from websites can serve legitimate integrity and commercial purposes, if done properly and in accordance with those websites terms. He said Meta was not using Bright Data to scrape rivals websites.

Stone added that Meta ended the relationship with Bright Data after learning that it was violating company terms prohibiting the automated collection and selling of data.

Many companies scrape websites to get data that helps them keep track of competitors, understand a specific audience, follow market trends and compare prices. It can pose a privacy risk when it targets personal information such as contact details, and can be a violation of EU law if companies don't make an effort to prevent that through technical and legal means. In November, Meta was fined €265 million $277 million by the EU for failing to protect user data from being scrapped by third parties.

Meta filed a lawsuit against Bright Data in San Francisco on January 6. One of the documents submitted is an email exchange between Meta representatives and Bright Data Chief Executive Officer Or Lenchner.

As you know, Meta has been a valued client of our proxy and scraping services for at least the last six years, Lenchner wrote in Dec. 1 email, referring to the two companies long-lasting successful partnership. Bright Data gave scraping services to Meta, but it didn't reveal which websites it was asked to target.

Bright Data filed a counter-suit asking for permission to scrape data from Facebook and Instagram. The company said it was in compliance with EU and US regulations and that it only collects public information that isn't login-protected.