Elon Musk’s X Corp. Sues Israeli Company Over Data Scraping

The company formerly known as Twitter has accused an Israeli data collection firm of illegally scraping and selling millions of its platform’s records.

Elon Musk‘s X Corp. argued in a new lawsuit that Bright Data Ltd. knowingly violated the social media platform’s terms of service, which bind the company because it and its executives are X account holders.

The complaint, filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, comes after Bright Data was hit with similar accusations by Meta Platforms Inc. that it harvested information from Facebook and Instagram. Last month, a 17-year-old and her father filed a claim in Israeli court against the company, arguing it sold personal information about minors that was found on the Meta sites.

Bright Data, which is based in Israel with offices in San Francisco and New York, specializes in retrieving “crucial public web data” for “Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, and small businesses,” according to its website. Originally named Luminati Networks, the company says on its website that it complies with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018.

According to the lawsuit, Bright Data offers data for sale from X, which was known as Twitter until Monday, as well as a “Web Scraper” tool that enables people to evade detection through a proxy network to access large volumes of data.

While X Corp. said it utilizes technology to detect and prevent data scraping, Bright Data is able to offer for sale “millions of pages and tens of millions of data points,” per its website. This data, the lawsuit said, includes follower counts, account types, links, bios, brand affiliations, posts, shares, locations, and hashtags—information that Bright Data could have “only obtained” through scraping.

X Corp. argued these practices violate the binding contracts all users must agree to when signing up for accounts on the platform. Its terms, cited in the complaint, state that “scraping the Services without our prior consent is expressly prohibited.”

Bright Data has agreed to these terms of service, the lawsuit alleged, because the company has a registered X account, as do six top executives and other employees. Still, the suit said the company scraped X data in violation of those terms and promotes its data-scraping products.

Bright Data CEO Or Lenchner said in a statement to Bloomberg Law that the company is fully compliant with the law and transparent about its data collection practices.

“Twitter’s lawsuit is an effort to build a wall around publicly available data on Twitter. It has no basis,” Lenchner said in a statement. “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.”

Suing the Israeli firm for breach of contract, tortious interference, and unjust enrichment, X Corp. asked for damages, a court order blocking further scraping, and for Bright Data to be required to identify the locations and the recipients of the data it obtained from X.

X Corp. is represented by Haynes and Boone LLP.

The case is X Corp. v. Bright Data Ltd., N.D. Cal., No. 3:23-cv-03698, complaint filed 7/26/23.