Meta removes wording from commercial terms that sparked suspicion of AI data scraping
Meta has updated its commercial terms text, which was interpreted as allowing content to be scraped from news sites and other web pages to train artificial intelligence models, by removing the relevant wording.
Meta has completely removed the controversial commercial terms that drew public reaction and criticism from experts for allegedly allowing content to be scraped from news sites and web pages to train artificial intelligence models.
The wording removed from Meta's commercial terms page stated that the company could use content from domain names and web pages to develop products and services, conduct research, and train artificial intelligence. This had been interpreted as granting the right to freely scrape data for AI training in a way that would override blocking instructions in websites' robots.txt files.
In response to the backlash, Meta Vice President of Communications Andy Stone and company spokesperson Daniel Roberts had defended that there were no changes to the use of web crawlers. With the latest update, the controversial wording has been completely removed from the text. Spokesperson Roberts stated that the crawling terms only apply to ads and business products, and content owners can still use the robots.txt file to indicate their preferences.