Meta recently revised its commercial terms of use, stating its right to utilize any content from a business account’s websites or URLs for purposes such as creating, enhancing, researching, training, and upholding the functionality of Meta’s offerings.
Legal professionals, as cited by Nieman Lab, characterized this as an “extraordinary clause” that appeared to authorize Meta to extract data from the websites of any publisher possessing a Meta business account, subsequently using this material for AI model training. (Although Meta successfully defended against a prominent copyright infringement lawsuit last year, other legal actions against AI firms, including Meta, are still active.)
Nevertheless, a Meta spokesperson asserted that these revised terms did not alter Meta’s web crawling practices. Subsequently, The Verge has reported the removal of the contentious provision.
In a statement, the company explained, “We acknowledge your concerns and wish to clarify: the consolidated crawling terms were exclusively relevant to our advertising and business offerings, a point we have now made explicit within the terms themselves. This modification does not affect how Meta employs web crawlers.”