The company’s latest commercial services agreement has been postponed while regulators in the EU and the U.K. get clarity, according to Reuters.
Meta said in a statement to Reuters that the issue is largely a misunderstanding, and asked for “more time for us to explain” the specific language used in the update.
Now, the company will have to explain all this to authorities in the EU and the U.K., both of which have called on Meta to clarify the update.
The concern is that these permissions could be used by Meta to legally scrape the website of any business with a Facebook or Instagram profile. Additional language in the update says that Meta would be able “to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs” for use in its own training and research processes.
Meta, of course, needs vast pools of data to train its AI models, and the update appears to give Meta permission to do this across any brand that continues to use its platforms.
The company has already come under scrutiny for the way it has scraped data sources to power its AI models, even allegedly using copyright-protected works within its training process.
The issue, however, has now stirred up a larger debate among regulatory groups. Politico reported that both the European Publishers Council and the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority have called on Meta to provide more clarity around the reasoning behind the update.
The pressure has compelled Meta to delay the launch of the updated terms, which were initially slated to go into effect by Oct 30.
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