Meta Drops Commercial Terms Language That Sparked AI Training and Scraping Concerns
aiinsider ·
Meta has removed a controversial provision from its updated commercial terms of use that raised significant concerns regarding AI training and data scraping. The original language potentially allowed the company to crawl websites associated with business accounts and use that content to develop, research, or train its AI models. Legal experts warned this could effectively grant Meta permission to feed publisher material into its systems without explicit consent. Although Meta initially claimed the terms did not change its web crawling practices, it later confirmed the removal of the specific language after receiving feedback. A spokesperson clarified that the consolidated crawling terms apply only to ads and business products, maintaining that general crawler usage remains unchanged. This incident occurs amidst ongoing global copyright disputes concerning the use of copyrighted material for AI training purposes. While Meta recently won a high-profile infringement lawsuit, other legal cases against the company and other AI firms remain active.
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