Late on Friday, Meta made some changes to a forthcoming policy, and acknowledged that the action was a response to criticism from business customers and members of the media.

“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,” says a Friday statement to the Mercury News.

The policy as laid out prior to the change made clear that businesses who use Meta’s products will be subject to a regime in which Meta can use those businesses’ website data for essentially anything, including AI training. The new terms (a preview of which is available here) appear to scale down the eye-poppingly huge umbrella under which businesses’ data might have been used. The explicit use of the term “train” is no longer in the terms, and the new document emphasizes “advertising and business products.”

But—also according to the Mercury News—one of the new policy’s prominent critics, News/Media Alliance spokesperson Sam Quigley, said of the new policy, “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.”

Quigley added, per the Mercury News, “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.”

txt, since the norms around old-fashioned web crawlers are becoming shaky as companies, emboldened by their AI ambitions, seem to want to redefine what a bot—broadly defined—should be allowed to do online.

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