• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, July 26, 2023

X Corp., formerly known as Twitter, has sued the Israeli company Bright Data for allegedly using automated tools to collect data from the service.

“Bright Data scrapes and sells millions of records from X Corp.’s X platform, in blatant violation of X Corp.’s terms of service,” X alleges in a complaint filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

“Bright Data also induces and facilitates other X users to violate their own agreements with X Corp. by selling automated data-scraping tools and services that specifically target a wide range of X Corp. data,” the tech company adds.

X Corp. brought the case several weeks after owner Elon Musk said he was attempting to combat scraping by limiting the number of tweets people could view each day.

Bright Data CEO Or Lenchner said through a spokesperson that the lawsuit “is an effort to build a wall around publicly available data on Twitter.”

“Bright Data is transparent in its public web data collection practices and is fully compliant with the law,” Lenchner added. “We are committed to making public data broadly available to everyone to benefit society and will vigorously defend our position in court to ensure the Internet remains accessible to all.”

The company says it collects public web data for more than 20,000 customers, including Fortune 500 companies, schools, non-profits, and large social media networks.

X Corp. isn't the only tech company to sue Bright Data. Earlier this year, Bright Data and Meta Platforms went to court over allegations regarding scraping.

Meta claimed in a federal complaint brought in the Northern District of California that Bright Data unlawfully scrapes data from Facebook and Instagram -- including people's profile information, followers and posts that users have shared -- and then offers to sell the information.

For its part, Bright Data argues that Meta has no legal basis to prevent anyone from visiting Facebook or Instagram and collecting publicly available information.

“Meta cannot block Bright Data from searching the web because Meta does not own the Internet. It is literally that simple,” Bright Data wrote in a motion seeking summary judgment in its favor.

A separate scraping dispute between LinkedIn and defunct analytics company hiQ Labs ended with a settlement last year, after a federal judge ruled ruled that hiQ violated LinkedIn's terms of service by scraping its site.