Meta has paid to extract data from other sites, publicly denouncing the practice.

Meta, the company that owns facebookWhatsapp and Instagram paid data collection companies for years BrightDate in exchange for their web scraping services, publicly denouncing the practice and suing other companies that scraped data from their own platforms and social media.

web scraping or web scraping’ is a technique that software uses to extract information from websites, typically by mimicking a person’s web browsing. This activity may or may not be allowed and may pose a threat to users’ privacy when collecting personal information.

Meta hypocrisy?

The company, led by Mark Zuckerberg, has condemned the activity and taken action to combat scraping, as explained in a statement on its website. In fact, automating the receipt of data without permission qualifies as a violation of its terms.

In January of this year, Target He went on to challenge web scraping, saying he is suing in the United States to ban Voyager Labs from Facebook and Instagram because they “created fake accounts and collected user data.”

Within this framework, according to some legal documents to which he had access bloomberg, Target had contracts “for years” with the company BrightDate, which offered him services such as collecting profile information. It also received information about likes, followers, shares and comments from the social networks TikTok and Twitter, as well as from e-commerce sites such as Amazon, eBay and Walmart.

These documents relate to the claim, which Target filed against the company Bright Data to collect information from facebook and Instagram and sell it later. Thus, through email correspondence from both companies, it was possible to confirm that Target also booked his services as explained bloomberg.

Meta confirms the procedure, but…

For its part, the representative TargetAndy Stone, confirmed in an interview bloomberg that the social media giant really paid BrightDate, but only for “data extraction from e-commerce sites”. However, he did not provide information about which sites he chose to retrieve the information.

In addition, Stone said they also used Bright Data to look for “malicious websites” and “phishing activities.” However, the spokesman stressed that Target I do not use BrightDate scrape the websites of competing companies. He also insisted that the collection of data from websites “may serve legitimate integrity and commercial purposes if done legally and in accordance with the terms of those websites.”

In this sense, knowing that BrightDate violated the terms Target After collecting data from Facebook and Instagram, the American company terminated the contracts with said company.

So, the parent company Instagram filed a lawsuit on January 6. Documents submitted include emails from the executive director bright data, Or a launcher in which detailed information is such as Target has long been a “value customer” of its proxy and scraping services “for at least the past six years”, as detailed bloomberg.

Finally, Bright Data filed a counterclaim with a request to continue extracting data from facebook and Instagram as it highlights its compliance with European Union and United States regulations. As you explained, it only collects public information that is not login protected. (Europe Press)

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