Hoping to quell criticism, Meta has dropped the word “train” from its “streamlined” commercial terms of service that kick in on October 30.
Last week, Meta faced backlash after legal experts warned that the tech giant’s sweeping new commercial terms of service seemed to give Meta permission to endlessly scrape websites linked on business pages. Talking to Nieman Lab, experts suggested that Meta could possibly use the policy to avoid millions in licensing fees from news organizations by requiring all business users to share a wealth of AI training data simply for running a business page.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed that Meta did not alert users to the changed language following backlash. This potentially only adds to confusion ahead of the policy rollout. In response to backlash, Meta’s spokesperson provided a statement to Ars, acknowledging Nieman Lab’s initial report but not its follow-up report reiterating experts’ concerns:
“We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”
The same experts who sounded the initial alarms were not impressed by Meta’s updates, which they told Nieman Lab do not go far enough to protect business page users from invasive scraping. Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, told Nieman Lab that “publishers should remain concerned.”
“The revised version of the new terms still allows Meta to use that scraped content to develop any ‘business product,’” Topic said. “That doesn’t seem to be a defined term, and presumably Meta is developing AI business products. I think ‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train.’”
What do updated terms say?
Initially, Meta’s terms authorized Meta to use “any content” from websites posted on business pages “to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity” of any Meta products, services, or features.
The updated terms delete the word “train” and no longer refer to “any content.” Instead, they allow Meta to “periodically pull updates” from business users’ websites in order to “provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products,” as well as to help Meta “maintain the integrity and security” of its products. This scraping, Meta says, is for users’ benefit, feeding into Meta research into products to “help you create and deliver ads and other commercial content, provide users information about your products and services, and connect you with users who may be interested in your products and services,” the policy says.
Following tweaks, it’s good that Meta added “more language about the permitted uses,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, told Nieman Lab. But “[the] ‘develop…advertising and business products’ [language] is still broad enough to drive a truck through,” he said. Ultimately, Grimmelmann agreed with Topic that “this does nothing to restrict the ‘associated with your products or services’ [language] that would let Meta scrape entire sites.”