A couple of months ago, when speaking at the European Parliament amid talk of partnership and shared prosperity, Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a warning about big tech.
"Technology platforms increasingly seek to act as sovereign powers," Carney said. "They want to dictate the rules of regulation — and even circumvent them. They want to control our data, spread misinformation and steal our children's childhoods."
As if it was trying to prove his point, earlier this month, Meta Platforms Inc. informed business customers that it was updating its commercial terms of service with language that many believed gave Meta clearance to crawl their websites and use the content to train its AI products.
After a swift backlash, particularly from publishers in the U.S., Meta removed the word "train" from the new terms within a day, claiming that the crawling applied only to its ad and business products.
But the backlash hasn't fully died down. Some experts say the updated terms of service — which allow Meta to "develop" and "improve" its business products using crawled data — could still give it unfettered access to publishers' content for AI training.
Meta has now delayed the implementation of the new terms until Nov. 20, which the company has said will give it more time to explain how it uses web crawlers and delineate "what's changing and what's not."
It's fitting to think that this episode is happening as Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning plays to disinterested theatre-goers. The film dramatizes the 2021 Facebook Files, a series of articles published in the Wall Street Journal based on leaks from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, which galvanized readers as it was revealed that the company knew its products caused harm. On screen and off, the pattern appears to be continuing: Meta moves first and fast, and then "asks" permission when they are caught.
Meta's crawlers already roam the open web gathering training data.
The company also trains on public posts, photos and comments on platforms it owns, Facebook, Instagram and Threads (going back to 2007). Privacy laws force a formal opt-out option in the EU and the U.K., but elsewhere, the main defence for individuals is making your posts private.
Under the original wording of its new terms of service, critics feared that any business using Meta's ad or business tools would have agreed, by contract, to allow Meta to use all of their content to train its various products, and that the new terms could override or circumvent previous objections.