Meta Fails to Beat Data Firm in Facebook, Instagram Scraping Row

Meta Platforms Inc. was denied an early win by a San Francisco federal judge who was unconvinced that Israeli internet firm Bright Data Ltd. violated the social media giant’s terms of service by scraping data from Facebook and Instagram.

US District Judge Edward Chen on Wednesday found that Bright Data had scraped only publicly available data on the platforms. Instagram and Facebook’s respective terms of service agreements also don’t prevent Bright Data from harvesting public data when the firm is logged out of its own accounts, Chen said in the ruling denying Meta’s motion for summary judgment.

“Meta ‘left the ...