Meta recently updated its Commercial Terms of Use to declare that the company may “use any content from any domain, web page, or URL (of a business account) to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of Meta products and services.”
Legal experts interviewed by the Nieman Institute said this appeared to be a “remarkable provision” that could give Meta permission to scrape the websites of any publisher with a Meta business account and use that content to train the company’s AI models. (Meta lost a high-profile lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement last year, but other lawsuits against AI companies, including Meta, continue.)
However, a Meta spokesperson insisted that the updated terms do not reflect any changes to how Meta crawls the web. Now, The Verge reports that this clause has been removed.
“We heard from you and want to be clear. The combined crawl terms only apply to our advertising and business products, and we’ve made that clear in the terms themselves,” the company said in a statement. “The way Meta uses web crawlers remains the same.”
