Meta has delayed the rollout of its updated commercial terms of service, according to an Oct. 23 report from Reuters. The postponement comes after publishers, advertisers and regulatory authorities raised concerns the new terms could allow Meta to scrape data from any business website with a Facebook or Instagram presence.
Meta said in a statement to Reuters that the issue is largely a misunderstanding, and asked for “more time for us to explain” the specific language used in the update.
Now, the company will have to explain all this to authorities in the EU and the U.K., both of which have called on Meta to clarify the update.
To recap, earlier this month, Meta began informing business users of a coming update to its terms of service, which, as noted by The Steampunk explorer, included this updated paragraph on permissions: “You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) 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, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.”
The concern is that these permissions could be used by Meta to legally scrape the website of any business with a Facebook or Instagram profile. Additional language in the update says that Meta would be able “to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs” for use in its own training and research processes.
Meta, of course, needs vast pools of data to train its AI models, and the update appears to give Meta permission to do this across any brand that continues to use its platforms.
The company has already come under scrutiny for the way it has scraped data sources to power its AI models, even allegedly using copyright-protected works within its training process.
But Meta said that these new terms of service are not about data scraping for AI, and are instead a consolidation of existing terms for clarity. In order to rectify the issue, Meta said it updated the terms of the incoming update last week, removing references to training.
The issue, however, has now stirred up a larger debate among regulatory groups. Politico reported that both the European Publishers Council and the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority have called on Meta to provide more clarity around the reasoning behind the update.
The pressure has compelled Meta to delay the launch of the updated terms, which were initially slated to go into effect by Oct 30. As reported by Fast Company, Meta has now pushed that launch date back to Nov 20, giving the company more time to address concerns.
The core question here is whether Meta was actually trying to sneak through an update that would enable it to scrape millions of business websites, or whether it was merely seeking to update its terms to clarify existing permissions.
As reported by The Guardian, in addition to the aforementioned copyright claim, Meta has been hit with several lawsuits over data scraping and the use of unlicensed IP to train its AI tools. That’s one of the many reasons why these updated terms sparked such significant pushback, even if Meta maintains that the update is only related to data used for ad content.
Meta said that businesses are still able to block data crawlers via commands within their robots.txt file on their respective websites, and that this update will not impinge upon existing legal protections.
Meta’s latest updated terms of service are available for review here.
