Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, attends the Viva Technology conference on innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 16, 2023.
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Elon Musk’s X Corp., Twitter’s parent company, last week filed a lawsuit against four unknown companies over data breaches on Twitter.
In data scraping, automated programs crawl publicly accessible websites to collect data that can later be used for a variety of purposes, including training large language models with artificial intelligence, targeting online advertisements, and more.
According to the case, filed in Dallas County, Texas District Court, X Corp. More than $1 million in damages for “unlawful data extraction from Texas residents.” The filing also states that the defendants allegedly entered into contracts with data processing facility operators in Dallas County, Texas.
The company was “unable to ascertain the identities” of the individuals, the filing said, but attorneys for X Corp. give four IP addresses instead of names.
Data scraping is generally legal in the US when it comes to scraping publicly available data. This follows a landmark 2022 ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Circuits that settled a year-long litigation by LinkedIn over the practice. The ruling upheld the Court of Appeals’ decision and found that scraping public data does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The petition from on the platform.
“In response to the massive demands placed on Corp. through extremely aggressive data shredders, Corp. Introduced limits on how many tweets each user can view in any given day,” the filing reads. “corp. also has limited access to Tweets for users who are not logged into a registered Twitter account.”
It wasn’t immediately clear if Twitter had attempted to block the IP addresses in question when it emerged that Twitter was involved in what the company described as improper data scraping.
“By unlawfully scapping data, the defendants not only ignore Corp.’s Terms of Service, but also the privacy preferences of Twitter users,” the filing reads.
A Twitter spokesman did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. An email to the company’s press email address provided an automated response with a poop emoji.
– CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.