Meta has removed controversial language from its commercial terms of use that appeared to give the company permission to collect content from business websites and use it to develop and train its artificial intelligence models.
The provision, highlighted in an earlier report by Nieman Lab, stated that Meta could use content from a business account’s domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of its products and services.
Legal experts told Nieman Lab that the wording was particularly concerning for publishers, as it appeared to potentially allow Meta to scrape websites belonging to businesses with Meta accounts and use their content for AI training. The issue comes amid ongoing legal disputes over the use of copyrighted material to train AI models, with publishers and content owners challenging technology companies over how their work is collected and used.
Meta had previously pushed back against concerns that the updated terms represented a change in its web-crawling practices. A company spokesperson said the language did not reflect any change in how Meta collects information from websites.
Following further scrutiny, Meta has now removed the disputed provision. The company said the terms had been consolidated to cover its advertising and business products, and that it had clarified this scope in the updated wording.
“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,” Meta said in a statement. “It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”
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The removal addresses concerns about the broad wording of the commercial terms, although Meta maintains that its underlying web-crawling practices have not changed.
