The change follows a report from Nieman Lab, which highlighted the language as a significant overreach that could allow Meta to ingest proprietary content without explicit consent. Legal analysts had warned that the phrasing effectively turned every business account into a data source for Meta’s machine learning infrastructure, raising immediate alarms regarding copyright and intellectual property rights.
In section Startups & Technology
Meta Retracts Controversial Web Scraping Language
After facing intense scrutiny from publishers over potential AI training practices, Meta has quietly scrubbed a provision from its commercial terms of use. The clause had previously granted the tech giant broad permission to scrape content from any business account’s web pages to develop and refine its artificial intelligence models.
Meta initially defended the text, claiming it was merely a consolidation of existing policies rather than a shift in data collection strategy. Following the backlash, the company clarified that the crawling terms were intended strictly for its advertising and business products. A spokesperson asserted that the removal serves to eliminate ambiguity, though the company maintains that its underlying web-crawling operations remain unchanged from previous standards.
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