Meta revises business terms after concerns over AI training and website scraping

Meta has updated its terms of use, initially including a clause that stipulates that the company can use any of the website's domains, pages, or links to business accounts to provide, develop, and improve Meta's products and services, as well as conducting research, model training, and maintaining the integrity of these products and services.

According to Nieman Lab, legal experts who spoke about the clause to the site noted that this clause is unusually striking, as it could give Meta permission to collect website content from any media organization that has a business account on its platforms, and then use that content to train its AI models, and these concerns come at a time when artificial intelligence companies, including Meta, are facing lawsuits related to the use of copyrighted content Intellectual property.

Although Meta successfully dropped a high-profile lawsuit over allegations of copyright infringement over the past year, other lawsuits against AI companies are ongoing, and Meta has confirmed that the terms update did not reflect any change in the way the company uses crawlers to index web content.

The Verge reported that the company removed the controversial clause. "We have listened to your feedback and want to clarify that the crawl terms that we have compiled into a uniform wording only apply to our advertising and commercial products, and we have made that clear in the terms themselves," Meta said in a statement, adding that this amendment "does not change the way Meta uses web crawlers."

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