Meta removes language that raised scraping and AI training concerns
Quick Answer
Meta has removed a controversial provision from its commercial terms that allowed scraping of business account content for AI training.
Quick Take
Legal experts had expressed concerns that this could enable Meta to utilize publisher content without consent. The company clarified that the terms only applied to ads and business products and did not change its web crawling practices.
Key Points
- Meta's updated terms initially raised concerns about content scraping for AI training.
- Legal experts viewed the provision as a potential threat to publisher rights.
- Meta insists the changes do not affect its web crawling methods.
- The controversial provision has now been officially removed.
- The company aims to clarify the scope of its crawling terms.
📖 Reader Mode
~1 min readMeta recently updated its commercial terms of use, declaring that the company can “use any content from [a business account’s] domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta products and services.
According to legal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab, this looked like a “remarkable provision” that could give Meta permission to scrape the website of any publisher with a Meta business account and use the content to train the company’s AI models. (While Meta defeated a high-profile lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement last year, other cases against AI companies, including Meta, continue.)
However, a Meta spokesperson insisted that the updated terms did not reflect a change in the way Meta crawls the web. And now, The Verge reports that the provision has been removed.
“We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves,” the company said in a statement. “It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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