Meta has recently modified its terms of service to remove a passage in which it was hinted that the company could "scrape" the entire content of web pages, including digital media, for free in order to train its Artificial Intelligence (AI).
In the latest update of its commercial conditions, the company had included wording stating that "Meta may use any content from domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of Meta's products, services, and features offered under these Commercial Terms and other applicable additional terms."
This change generated a wave of criticism from digital law specialists, as reported by media such as Nieman Lab, considering that, for news publishers, it meant accepting that Meta could train its AI models with any content from their portals without compensation, resorting to automated data extraction tools to collect information from sites linked to commercial accounts on its platforms.
After the controversy, the multinational led by Mark Zuckerberg has reviewed its Commercial Conditions again and has published a new version in which the controversial fragment is removed, with the aim of preventing such formulations from causing confusion about the use of data for training its AI.
Meta's vice president of communications, Andy Stone, has commented on this on his X (formerly Twitter) profile, where he insisted that "there is no change in how Meta uses web trackers and any insinuation to the contrary is false."
In the same vein, the company's spokesperson, Daniel Roberts, has explained to the specialized media The Verge that "We have heard you and want to clarify: the tracking terms we have consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we have clarified this in the terms themselves. It does not change how Meta uses web trackers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to indicate their preferences. This has nothing to do with 'scraping' news sites, and these updates do not give us new rights to override those preferences."
Despite this rectification in the original English version of the Commercial Conditions, the text available in Spanish still includes the deleted fragment, which evidences a discrepancy between both linguistic versions of the terms of use.