Meta's New Terms of Service and Artificial Intelligence Training Debates
Meta's updated commercial terms raised concerns that the company could use data from news sites to train artificial intelligence models. In response to the backlash, the company narrowed the scope and made adjustments.
Meta's new commercial terms of service, set to take effect on October 30, became the focus of criticism on the grounds that they could allow the company to crawl publishers' websites without permission to develop its artificial intelligence products.
Controversial Terms of Service
Reports shared by Nieman Lab suggested that Meta's new terms granted the authority to crawl websites and collect data from businesses using their platforms. This situation brought along concerns that the content of news sites could be used for artificial intelligence training.
Legal and Technical Concerns
Legal experts warned that the regulation in question could lead Meta to bypass existing licensing agreements and invalidate blocking instructions in robots.txt files.
Statements from Meta
Meta representatives initially argued that the updates were merely aimed at combining commercial and advertising services. The company stated that crawling activities were aimed at collecting product information for ad recommendations, not news sites.
Update Made to the Terms
Following the backlash, Meta updated its terms on October 17 and clarified with an official statement that the crawling authority was limited only to advertising and business products.