The Israeli company Bright Data, which is engaged in collecting public information from the Internet, defeated the technology giant Meta, in a lawsuit that the latter filed against the company in the San Francisco District Court about a year ago, in what appears to be a precedent ruling allowing the collection of public information from the Internet.
The Senior Judge of the District Court of San Francisco, Edward Chen, ruled on Tuesday afternoon (US time) in favor of Bright Data in the lawsuit that Meta filed against the Israeli company.
Support terrorists on social networks and get arrested - gathering information can also have good sides // Photo: from the networks
According to the ruling, the information gathering company did not violate Meta's terms of use when it collected public information from Facebook and Instagram, and rejected Meta's claims of breach of contract on Bright Data's part.
"Meta has not presented sufficient evidence to raise a reasonable inference that Bright Data collected data when logging into an account and thereby accessing non-public data," Chen wrote.
"Despite having access to its computer infrastructure as well as extensive discovery opportunities, Meta has not shown that protected data of its users, which is not publicly available, was collected and sold by the company."
The home page of the "Bright Data" website where you can register for the service, photo: the company's website
Or Lanchaner, CEO of Bright Data, said that "when Meta contacted us with the demand to stop allowing our customers to collect public information (scraping) from Facebook and Instagram, we decided that the right thing was to refuse and go to an expensive battle, because this is the right and just thing from our point of view."
"Despite many efforts by the technology giants to exclusively control public information on the Internet, once the court was required to address the issue, common sense prevailed. Public information as it is, public. This has always been our claim and we are very happy about the precedential decision that supports this approach. We will continue to fight on the basic right to free access to public information online and to be leaders in the field."
Young people with smartphones.
Sharing information publicly comes with a cost.
Illustration, photo: GettyImages
Claims of violation of terms of use
Remember, Facebook is not the only one that sued the Israeli company.
Company X (formerly Twitter) also sued Bright Data, claiming that the business intelligence company "scrapes and sells millions of records, in flagrant violation of the terms of use," and that "Bright Data encourages and enables other X users to violate their agreement with X Corp, Through the sale of data scraping tools and automated services."
As of this writing, the trial between X and Bright Data is still ongoing.
It should be noted that in light of the ruling in the trial against Facebook, the chances are increasing that the trial against X will also go in the positive direction from the point of view of the information gathering company.
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