Meta has removed the word “train” from its upcoming terms of service for business accounts. The company revised its terms after Nieman Lab’s story on Thursday exposed that the new terms would permit broad scraping of websites “associated with” business accounts, and possibly allow Meta to use that scraped content to train its AI models.
In its revision, published Friday afternoon, Meta removed the word “train” from a list of allowed use cases and limited those uses to “advertising and business products,” rather than all Meta products. But the revised terms will still allow for broad scraping of websites, potentially superseding robots.txt files, according to legal experts.
On Saturday, a Meta spokesperson said the company revised the terms because “it wasn’t clear in the initial consolidation of terms that robots.txt preferences are respected. News sites, like all other content owners, still have the ability to disable the crawler via robots.txt flags. That has been the case, and it has not changed.”
