Meta Removes AI Training Clause From Business Terms
Meta has removed a clause from its updated business terms that could have allowed the company to use content from business accounts for AI training. The company stated the change was a consolidation of existing ad terms and did not expand data collection.
Meta has removed a clause from its recently updated business service terms that had raised concerns about its ability to use content from business accounts for training its artificial intelligence models. The company has since deleted the controversial language.
The clause stated that Meta could use "any content from [business account] domains, webpages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain" Meta products and services. Legal experts had pointed out that this could have granted Meta the right to scrape content from publishers' websites using Meta business accounts and utilize it for AI training.
According to The Verge, the clause has now been formally removed. A Meta spokesperson asserted that the update was intended to consolidate existing advertising terms and did not represent a change in how Meta crawls the web. The company reiterated that website owners retain control over web crawlers through the robots.txt file.
Meta stated it had heard feedback and clarified that the update was a "consolidation" of existing ad terms, not an expansion of its crawling activities. The company affirmed that the collected data is intended solely for "advertising and commercial products" and that site owners can still manage crawler permissions via robots.txt.