Meta has changed the wording of its upcoming Terms of Service update, after concerns were raised that new provisions in the agreement could be used to enable Meta to scrape the website of any business with a Facebook Page.
Earlier this month, Stephen Beale of The Steampunk Explorer noted that Meta’s updated Terms of Service included new language that seemingly extended beyond the company’s current terms in regards to the use of data scraping to train its artificial intelligence-powered systems.
The revised terms state that businesses which continue to use Meta’s platforms after Oct. 30 authorize Meta to “use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services.”
The revised terms also state that businesses give permission for Meta “to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs” for use in its own training and research processes.
The updated terms have apparently been revised to cover Meta in cases of business data usage amid ongoing questions around how Meta, and specifically Meta AI, accesses and uses third-party information within its systematic processing.
Meta has faced several lawsuits over data scraping and use of copyright-protected works in training its AI tools, and the revised terms seem to give Meta more legal cover in such instances.
Though as reported by Nieman Lab, various legal experts said that this terminology could be used to justify widespread scraping of business data. In which case, the only recourse for businesses would be to shut down their Meta accounts ahead of the Oct. 30 deadline.
In response to these concerns, The Verge reported that over the weekend, Meta updated the new terms in order to dilute the potential for Meta to use these as a means to essentially steal business data.
As Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts explained to The Verge: “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.”
That should offer more assurance to business users, though the provisions will still enable Meta to gather data from business websites to help power its ad targeting process.
