Meta has delayed enforcement of new business terms that publishers feared would let it scrape their sites for AI training, pushing the start date from 30 October to 20 November. The retreat came after a trade body representing news organisations wrote to the company's chief executive demanding a rewrite.
The Verge reported that the terms appeared to grant Meta permission to freely scrape news sites that use its platforms and use the material for AI training. Meta later revised the language to remove references to training its products, but legal experts argued the change was not enough to rule out the possibility.
The letter and the delay
The News/Media Alliance sent a letter to Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, according to The Verge, demanding the company revise the terms over concerns they would cause severe harm to publishers. Digital advertisers and publishers in the EU and the UK also urged regulators to force Meta to halt the new terms.
Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts told The Verge the terms will now take effect on 20 November "to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what's changing and what's not." Roberts said the delay would give Meta time to lay out how it uses web crawlers and the fact that content owners can still use robots.txt to signal their preferences. The Verge reported the story earlier via Fast Company.
For writers and small publishers, robots.txt is the practical lever named in Meta's statement: a file on a site that tells scrapers whether they may crawl it. The delay does not change what the terms say, only when they bite.
Google widens the ad use of personal data
The same week, Google changed its privacy policy in a way that connects AI personalisation to advertising. The Verge reported that the update, spotted by Android Authority, adds an exception to Google's promise not to use Drive, Gmail or Google Photos for personalised ads. As of 16 October, the policy reads: "unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads."
In practice, anyone who has connected those services to AI Mode and other Search tools through Google's Personal Intelligence feature may now see ads targeted on the basis of that content. Google told The Verge that advertisers do not get access to the information in Drive, Gmail and Photos, or to identifying details such as a name or email address, and that it will not show ads based on sensitive categories including race, sexual orientation, religion or health.
"Depending on your settings, we may also show you personalized ads based on your interests, activity, or personalized content from Google services. For example, if you search for 'mountain bikes,' in Search you may see ads for sports equipment on YouTube."
That language comes from Google's policy, as quoted by The Verge. Users who want to stop it can disconnect apps from Search's Personal Intelligence features or turn off personalised recommendations in the Search Services Personalization settings page, The Verge reported.
What it means for people who publish
The two changes touch different ends of the same problem. Meta's terms govern whether a publisher's pages can be pulled in and used, and the company is now spending three extra weeks explaining its crawler rules. Google's update governs what happens to material a user has already handed over, and it folds advertising into the same permission that improves AI answers.
Neither company has said it will pay publishers for the material involved. What the sources describe is a set of switches: robots.txt at Meta, and the personalisation settings at Google. The next firm date in the record is 20 November, when Meta's terms take effect.
Sources
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