Meta recently revised its commercial terms of service to state that the company may utilize "any content from [a business account’s] domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of" its various products and services.
Legal experts consulted by Nieman Lab described this as a "remarkable provision" that could grant Meta the authority to scrape the websites of any publisher holding a Meta business account and utilize that content to train the company’s artificial intelligence models. Although Meta successfully defeated a high-profile lawsuit regarding alleged copyright infringement last year, other legal actions against AI companies, including Meta, are still ongoing.
A spokesperson for Meta clarified that the updated terms did not actually signify a shift in the company's web crawling practices. Furthermore, reports from The Verge indicate that the specific provision in question has been successfully eliminated.
“We have listened to your feedback and wish to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated applied exclusively to our advertising and business products, which we have now explicitly stated within the terms themselves,” the company stated. The spokesperson emphasized that this update does not alter how Meta utilizes its web crawlers.
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