Meta announced Friday evening that it had made “clarifications” regarding its new updated terms of service for its business and commercial products, which some legal and media experts had previously decried as being too unfair to content creators.
The initial proposed changes, which Bay Area News Group reported earlier Friday, had granted Meta sweeping new authority to scrape business users’ websites for content to power its artificial intelligence products without a contract or compensation, according to some legal and media experts.
The new version appears to remove some of the more explicit language, but many questions remain.
Daniel Roberts, a Meta spokesperson, sent an email to Bay Area News Group just after 5 p.m. Friday, in which he included a statement from an unnamed spokesperson.
“We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves,” the statement reads.
This second version, which like its predecessor, is set to take effect on Oct. 30, affects any and all entities with free business accounts – which are encouraged by Meta for “businesses, brands, and celebrities.” Such accounts are in common use across many industries, including the media.
The initial version of the terms of use had granted Meta the authority to “use automated software” to grab “any content” in order to “develop” its own offerings, including artificial intelligence.
For example, if a newspaper posts a link to one of its own stories on its own Facebook page, Meta had claimed it could automatically retrieve anything else on that publication’s website and use it to “develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity” of a slew of its products and services.
However, the new version of these terms seems to dial those claims back.
Now, Meta says that its “automated software” can grab “any content” in service of “advertising and business products,” among other rationales, including to “maintain the integrity and security of Meta Company Products.”
Notably, one question is how Meta will use robots.txt — a commonly-used set of voluntary instructions that give guidance to a type of automated software known as “web crawlers,” which captures portions of most websites.
In its Friday evening statement, Meta also reiterated that the new changes do “not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”
Sam Quigley, the director of communications for the News/Media Alliance, a journalism trade group that had previously slammed Meta’s new move, told Bay Area News Group that it remained “concerned about the language.”
“It appears as if the new language just limits what Meta is allowed to use publisher content for, but not their ability to crawl and get the content in the first place,” he said.
“They may have taken out training from the listed uses, but with it not being expressly ruled out, it’s still potentially on the table. They say they’ll respect robots.txt, but there are no guarantees there. This is still a non-starter as far as we’re concerned.”
But these revisions still leave some ambiguities, according to Eric Goldman, a tech law professor at Santa Clara University, who told Bay Area News Group that while the new revisions are narrower, they remain “still vague and potentially overbroad.”
“That catchall reference to ‘maintain the integrity and security of Meta Company Products’ could mean anything,” he said in an email. “Also, Meta’s continued insistence that it will honor robots.txt is still not incorporated into this language. If Meta really plans to honor robots.txt, why not say so expressly in the (terms of service)?”