X (formerly Twitter) lost a lawsuit against Bright Data, a data scraping company. X accused Bright Data of violating its terms by stealing and utilizing user info. However, the court dismissed the case, allowing Bright Data to continue using social media user data within certain limits.
Bright Data, which recently won a similar case against Meta, maintains that it only scrapes information that's publicly accessible without a login. X claimed that Bright Data not only sells user data without permission but also evades X's anti-scraping technology.
Judge William Alsup dismissed X's claim, stating it was circumstantial and not in defense of user privacy. He noted that X is willing to sell user info for a price and was only seeking to stop Bright Data because it was evading those fees.
The issue of data scraping from social media profiles has been a subject of legal debate due to complexities around data ownership and its usage. Current law doesn't subject publicly accessible content to general copyright, especially when the claim is made by the platform and not the individual.
This issue has become more pressing with the rise of large language models (LLMs) powering AI systems. Most social apps are now working to protect their data to prevent AI projects from using it. However, there's no legal precedent that stops the re-use of publicly accessible social platform info.
In 2022, LinkedIn won a legal battle against hiQ Labs, which had been using LinkedIn member data to build its own service. LinkedIn was allowed to block hiQ's access under legal challenge. However, when Meta tried similar legal enforcement against Bright Data, it was rejected by the courts.
The law seems to side with data scrapers when the data is publicly available without a login. But if the data is accessed via a logged-in user, it's considered proprietary and enforceable by law. This may lead to more content getting locked down and hidden to non-users. However, platforms like X benefit from having their posts displayed in Google Search results, which requires them to remain publicly visible.
