Meta removes from its commercial terms wording read as a right to scrape websites for SI training
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
The disputed line is gone from Meta's terms.
A sentence has disappeared from Meta's commercial terms page saying that Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain its products. The rules were due to take effect on October 30. Experts, including Cornell professor James Grimmelmann and Nieman Lab, read the sentence as an attempt to gain the right to use content scraped from sites, including news sites, for SI training for free and to override robots.txt blocks. Meta representatives Andy Stone and Daniel Roberts said nothing changes in how Meta's crawlers work and that the terms applied only to advertising and business products.
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