Meta’s planned commercial terms of service update has become a significant topic of concern for the company, and it may now be forced to abandon the update altogether in order to avoid additional scrutiny.
Earlier this month, Meta began informing business users of an upcoming update to its commercial terms of service, which included a change in wording that could have allowed Meta to scrape the website of any business that maintained a Facebook or Instagram presence.
Legal experts raised the alarm, which prompted regulatory groups to pose questions about the change.
Meta has maintained that the purpose of the update is not related to data scraping, and is instead to help with data gathering for the sole purpose of ad targeting. Even so, in response to these queries, Meta delayed the launch of the updated terms, shifting the implementation date from Oct. 20 to Nov. 20.
Then last week, as reported by Reuters, Meta said that it could end up delaying the rollout indefinitely in order to address concerns raised by regulatory groups.
Among those is the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, which, according to The Next Web, has opened an investigation into Meta’s commercial terms for businesses. The European Publishers Council is also assessing next steps amid rising concerns about the gathering of business data to power AI models.
It’s impossible to know the intention of Meta’s planned update, but it does seem plausible that the initial update was not intended to empower broad-scale data-scraping, and that Meta’s inclusion of the term “scraping,” which has a different context in the AI era, has caused this new issue.
But either way, Meta is now working to address concerns ahead of the planned update.
Meta has made a copy of its updated commercial terms available for review, with a note at the top of the screen still indicating that they will go into effect on Nov. 20.
