Meta wins $365K against Hong Kong social media company over data scraping

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Meta data-scraping settlement overview: 

• Who: Meta has won a lawsuit it filed against Hong Kong social media data company Social Data Trading Ltd.
• Why: Meta had alleged Social Data Trading Ltd. illicitly scraped account profiles from websites such as Instagram. 
• Where: The Meta data-scraping settlement was filed in a California federal court.

Meta has won a default victory in its lawsuit alleging Hong Kong social media data company Social Data Trading Ltd. used bots to scrape account profiles from websites including Instagram, a California federal court has ruled.

On Dec. 8, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer handed Meta the victory, and awarded it $365,000 in attorney fees after the Hong Kong company failed to fight the case.

Meta filed the lawsuit against Social Data Trading in 2021, alleging it scraped the profiles of more than 90 million Instagram users before selling the data.

Social Data bills itself as selling “in-depth insights into the demographics and psychographics of influencers and their audiences,” the complaint stated. 

However, it used bots to scrape publicly viewable profiles of users, Meta said. The bots collected information like username, profile photo, number of followers, posts and likes, as well as information about their followers, including gender, language and location, it said. The company then sold the information as insights and data, Meta alleged.

“For example, customers who purchased defendant’s ‘Audience Data’ product entered the username of an Instagram user about whom they sought data into the search bar of socialdata.hk,” Meta said. “Defendant then generated a report with information scraped from that account.”

Judge orders injunction in Meta data scraping lawsuit

The court has also ordered a number of injunctions.

It enjoins Social Data Trading from accessing or attempting to access Meta’s platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, and Meta’s computer systems.

It also enjoins the company from developing, offering and marketing software or computer code intended to automate data collection or circumvent Meta’s enforcement measures and from selling any data purportedly obtained from Meta or any of its products. 

Meanwhile, a judge in October approved a settlement agreement made between Facebook and a class of Android users claiming the company scraped and sold their data and text logs to advertisers without their consent.

What do you think of this Meta settlement? Let us know in the comments.

Meta is represented by Kaplana Srinivasan, Oleg Elkhunovich, Michael Gervais, Lear Jiang and Chanler Langham of Susman Godfrey LLP.

The Meta data-scraping case is Meta Platforms Inc. v. Social Data Trading Ltd., Case No. 3:21-cv-09807, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

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