Meta removes clause raising scraping and AI training concerns

Meta has removed a passage from its terms of business use that had raised concerns about scraping and AI training. The clause had stated that Meta could use content from business account domains, web pages, or URLs to develop, improve, research, train, and maintain its products and services. Legal experts told Nieman Lab that this looked like a provision that could allow Meta to scrape content from the websites of publishers with Meta business accounts for use in training AI models. A Meta spokesperson had previously insisted that the terms update did not reflect a change in its web scraping practices; according to The Verge, the clause has now been removed, and Meta says the consolidated scraping terms apply only to advertising and commercial products, and has clarified this in the terms, without changing how it uses web crawlers.