Businesses have reacted with anger to plans by Meta to scrape content from business Facebook accounts.
Meta, the company behind Facebook, has plans to make a change to its terms which mean they would have legal cover to use content for AI training.
Changes were due soon but a strong backlash led to Meta saying they would make time for further consultation.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said: “We’re committed to getting this right, and we expect this consultation could extend beyond November 20, in which case we’d delay implementation of the updated terms. Until then, our existing terms remain in place.”
He added: “The crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves,” it says. “It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”
An editorial in PC Mag said: The new terms seem to have removed the word “train” from the section that alarmed publishers. The revised section also mentions applying the web scraping specifically to “advertising and business products.
Previously it had been reported that Meta plans to enact new commercial terms on October 30 that apply to customers who use the company’s social media accounts for business and marketing purposes. The document includes a section under “License & Rights You Provide” that effectively allows Meta to use automated software to scrape URLs and domains associated with the user’s account.
Under a section called “Licences and Rights you Provide Meta”, it says you authorise us, or any entity acting on our behalf, to use automated software and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyse, 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 are made available through you, or your users’ use of Meta products and services.
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.
Media organisations have described the plan as nuts. Theo Bamber, Chief Executive of the News Media Association, said: “This detail, buried in a pile of other stuff, will see Meta scraping data worth millions, or billions, in a licensing market. Yes, it needs to be legally tested, but the idea they think they can just get away with it is staggering. Saying this is arrogant behaviour doesn’t really touch the sides.”
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