Meta drops the word "train" from its commercial TOS after AI backlash
Meta changes AI scraping policy but won’t add language respecting robots.txt.
Meta has removed the word "train" from its commercial terms of service (TOS) in an effort to address criticism surrounding its new policy. The change will take effect on October 30. Legal experts have raised concerns that the updated TOS appears to grant Meta permission to continuously scrape websites linked on business pages. This could potentially enable the company to circumvent millions of dollars in licensing fees from news organizations.
By requiring all business users to share a significant amount of AI training data merely for operating a business page, the updated policy may have been seen as a way for Meta to avoid these costs.
Experts have expressed their concerns to Nieman Lab, suggesting that Meta could exploit the policy to avoid substantial licensing fees. However, Meta did not notify users of the changes following the backlash. In response to the criticism, a Meta spokesperson confirmed the changes but did not acknowledge the follow-up report from Nieman Lab, reiterating the experts' concerns.
The spokesperson's statement to Ars acknowledged the initial report by Nieman Lab but did not address the subsequent concerns brought up in the follow-up report.
Written by urgent.news from Ars Technica's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
