 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Data collection and proxy services |
| Founded | 2014 |
| Headquarters | |
Key people | Or Lenchner (CEO) |
| Website | brightdata |
Bright Data (previously as Luminati Networks), is a global technology company that offers web data collection and proxy services to B2B companies. Since 2018, the CEO of Bright Data is Or Lenchner. [1] [2]
The company was founded under the name Luminati Networks as a division of the Hola VPN company in 2014. [3] In 2017, Luminati Networks was sold separately from Hola to EMK Capital, a private investment fund from London, at a value of approximately 200 million dollars. [4] [5] [6] In March 2021, Luminati Networks was renamed to Bright Data. [7]
In May 2021, Bright Data founded an organization called The Bright Initiative with the aim of making data available at no cost to non-profits, organizations and research bodies. The organization serves more than 700 companies, including 300 academic institutions. [8] [9]
In September 2022, the company acquired the Israeli start-up Market Beyond, which works in the analysis of e-commerce data based on artificial intelligence. [10] [11]
In June 2023, Bright Data joined the Amazon Web Services ISV Accelerate program. [12] [13]
In July, X Corp, formerly known as Twitter, sued Bright Data for scraping data from Twitter, violating its terms of service. [14] [15] This followed a similar lawsuit by Meta Platforms against Bright Data for data harvesting from Facebook and Instagram in January of the same year. [16] Bright Data countersued, asserting its commitment to making public data accessible, claiming legality in its web data collection practices. [17] [18] [19]
In January 2024, Bright Data won a legal dispute with Meta. A federal judge in San Francisco declared that Bright Data did not breach Meta's terms of use by scraping data from Facebook and Instagram, consequently denying Meta's request for summary judgment on claims of contract breach. [20] [21] [22] This court decision in favor of Bright Data’s data scraping approach marks a significant moment in the ongoing debate over public access to web data, reinforcing the freedom of access to public web data for anyone. [23]
At the same time, Bright Data, in collaboration with the Molly Rose Foundation charity, released a research report titled "Preventable yet Pervasive: The Prevalence and Characteristics of Harmful Content, Including Suicide and Self-Harm Material, on Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest." This study provided insights into the extent and nature of harmful content on these social media platforms. [24]
In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by X Corp. (formerly Twitter) against Bright Data, ruling that the company did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data. [25] The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies, [26] and highlighted that X's concerns were more about financial compensation than protecting user privacy. [27]
Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company, engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the Big Five American technology companies; the other four are Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman and investor. He is the founder, chairman, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, product architect, and former chairman of Tesla, Inc.; owner, executive chairman, and CTO of X Corp.; founder of the Boring Company and xAI; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation. He is one of the wealthiest people in the world; as of April 2024, Forbes estimates his net worth to be $178 billion.
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Starlink is a satellite internet constellation operated by Starlink Services, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of American aerospace company SpaceX, providing coverage to over 75 countries. It also aims to provide global mobile broadband.
OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015, researching artificial intelligence with the goal of developing "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence, which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As one of the leading organizations of the AI boom, it has developed several large language models, advanced image generation models, and previously, released open-source models. Its release of ChatGPT has been credited with starting the AI boom.
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Yizhar Nitzan Shai, also spelled Izhar Shay, is an Israeli entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and politician. He served as a member of the Knesset for Blue and White between 2019 and 2021, and as Minister of Science & Technology from 2020 to 2021.
Meta Platforms, Inc., doing business as Meta, and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among other products and services. Meta ranks among the largest American information technology companies, alongside other Big Five corporations Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. The company was ranked #31 on the Forbes Global 2000 ranking in 2023.
Facebook, Inc., has been involved in many lawsuits since its founding in 2004.
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Bluesky, also known as Bluesky Social, is a decentralized microblogging social platform and a public benefit corporation based in the United States. Jay Graber serves as the company's CEO and XMPP creator Jeremie Miller sit on its board of directors.
ElonJet is a service that uses social media accounts to track the real-time private airplane usage of Elon Musk. The service, created and provided by Jack Sweeney using public data, has accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Truth Social, Mastodon, Threads, and formerly on Twitter, where the Twitter account once had about 530,000 followers, before being suspended. Several of the social media accounts use the handle @elonjet.
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