Meta paid contractor to ‘scrape’ data while condemning it in lawsuits
Christopher Hutton
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Meta was revealed to have been paying contractors to take data from third-party websites, despite the company publicly opposing such behavior and suing companies who did the same to them.
The social media giant’s conduct was revealed amid legal proceedings in California, where Meta sued Bright Data, an Israeli data-collection company, over its harvesting and selling of data gathered from Instagram and Facebook. The company for years had sought a relationship with Bright Data, according to emails revealed in the court proceedings and reported by Bloomberg. Meta has sued other companies for similar practices.
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The exchanges with Bright Data were confirmed by Meta spokesman Andy Stone, who said that Meta had paid Bright Data to gather data from e-commerce websites to develop brand profiles. Bright Data also helped Meta find “harmful websites” and “phishing operations,” Stone said.
Meta ended its contract with Bright Data after learning it violated Meta’s terms regarding the collection and selling of data, Stone said. The company sued Bright Data on Jan. 6 to stop its data collecting practices.
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Web scraping is a common practice used by some companies in an effort to better track competitors, to understand an audience, and to follow price changes. The practice has gotten Meta into trouble, however. The company was fined $277 million in November for failing to protect user data from scraping techniques.
Meta has filed multiple suits against other data scraper services, such as Voyager Labs, Octopus, and BrandTotal Ltd over their practices of scraping Facebook and Instagram for their data.