Most of us seem to be unaware of just how much data we post on social media gets collected, stored, and analyzed by software and specialists and ultimately used on us. Sometimes, this is in the form of ads and various marketing tactics; in other cases, it is used as a means for behavioral and psychological analysis.
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The easiness at which digital data from young users can be collected has recently come to light in two court lawsuits that were submitted, with Meta and Twitter on one side and Bright Data – an Israeli company for data collection that is active on the global market – on the other side.
The lawsuits and countersuit deal with whether privacy concerns were not fully addressed. Bright Data – whose clients include various United Nations agencies, international NGOs, and governments – is one of the companies that knows how to use the data we share on social media. Meta was also in this business, until recently.
In January 2023, Meta asked Bright Data to stop scraping data from its platforms, noting that it was repeatedly being fined by the EU for violating privacy laws. When Bright Data refused, Meta decided to sue the company, ostensibly over trade issues but implicitly over alleged privacy violations for its users. According to the lawsuit, as early as April 2021, Bright Data was running an operation for scraping data from various Meta-owned platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, allegedly circumventing the terms of service.
Moreover, Meta said that the Israel company put on sale databases it collected from the various sites and platforms and that it was selling its technology to third parties so that they, too, could scrape data from Meta platforms and thus circumvent the various restrictions that have been placed to protect users' privacy.
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X, formerly known as Twitter, also sued Bright Data, claiming that the business intelligence "scrapes and sells millions of records from X Corp.'s X platform, in blatant violation of X Corp.'s Terms of Service, by which Bright Data is bound" and that it "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."
Bright Data countersued. In a conversation with Israel Hayom, the company said the following:
"Twitter and Meta are attempting to block public information on the web, which is freely accessible and does not sit behind a log in. Scraping public data is legal, important for humanity, and is crucial to all business operations that exist on the web. Its legality has been reaffirmed by courts that it is part of the public domain, which is why the lawsuit is over breach of contract. It is important to take note that if Bright Data did not have a business profile page on those platforms, there would be no lawsuits."
It also added the following explanation of how events unfolded:
"The beginning of the affair in January of this year, when the company Meta contacted Bright Data demanding that it stop harvesting data from its platforms, this against the background of the repeated fines of the European Union against it for violating the privacy laws of the citizens of the Union. " This makes it sound like Bright Data was fined.
"Meta decided to sue the company, allegedly due to commercial issues but also due to the violation of the privacy of its users." -The lawsuit is clear, this has nothing to do with the privacy of the users. The lawsuit is not based on the privacy of users so this is factually incorrect."
Meanwhile, class action was initiated against the company in Israel, alleging that it was scraping users' data and selling it. It claims that this includes minors. Attorney Lior Lahav, who represents some of the Israeli plaintiffs, told Israel Hayom that Bright Data's actions have been made possible in part because of lacking consumer protection regulation in Israel.
According to Lahav, the "regulators in Israel largely shy away from action, and this is very clear. They do not manage the whole issue of data protection and do not impose fines on companies that violate the law. The truth of the matter is that we lag behind the rest of the world by a sizeable margin. Just look at the fines on Google and Facebook in Europe on a monthly basis. Regulation in Israel hasn't really been successful in protecting citizens."
Youths, who share almost everything on social media, suffer greatly from privacy violations. This realization has led to strict demands when it comes to collecting data and to the introduction of guardrails online. Governments and businesses have begun requiring social media to set strict age restrictions for entering their platforms.
Dr. Liraz Margalit is a social psychologist who specializes in behavioral design and decision making in the digital age. She is also a witness on behalf of the plaintiffs. She says that "because of the effects of the social media, we don't even think about who is looking at our information or what that person does with it later. We just seek gratification from sharing it, and it makes us feel special."
She added, "This is a very big danger. Parents share information on their children from when they are about three years old. They not only let companies such as Bright Data collect information on them, they also make it easier for hackers to steal their identity. This is perhaps an extreme scenario, but today we can learn things about people as soon as they are born. Moreover, we have to take into account that for most people, the brain is fully developed only at 25, and therefore until then, young people can be much more easily exposed to outside influence from marketers and advertisers, as well as news and current events. Collecting information on young users brings us to a situation in which we have the real danger of shaping the children's personalities by corporations, trading companies, and even hostile entities."
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