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X updates its terms to ban crawling and scraping (techcrunch.com)

submitted 1 year ago by geosoco@kbin.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

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The new terms, which are effective from September 29, ban any kind of scraping or crawling without “prior written consent.”

NOTE: crawling or scraping the Services in any form, for any purpose without our prior written consent is expressly prohibited.

The previous version of the terms allowed crawling in accordance with robots.txt.

“NOTE: crawling the Services is permissible if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file, however, scraping the Services without our prior consent is expressly prohibited,” it read.

In the last few months, Twitter has also altered its robots.txt file — a file that gives instructions to robot crawlers about what parts of the site they are permitted to visit — to remove instructions for all crawler bots apart from Google.

In 2015, Twitter confirmed that it had a firehose deal in place with Google to surface tweets in search results. It is not clear if the nature or terms of that deal have changed under the new management.

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[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 8 points 1 year ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter, has updated its terms of service to prohibit scraping and crawling — likely to fend off any AI models training on its data.

The new terms, which are effective from September 29, ban any kind of scraping or crawling without “prior written consent.”

At that time, Musk had said that it was a temporary measure because the site was getting “data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users.”

In April, he threatened to sue Microsoft for illegally using the social network’s data to train AI models.

Earlier this month, X changed its privacy policy to state it might use public data to train AI models.

Musk has previously noted during a Twitter space that xAI, a company founded in July, would use public data such as tweets to train its models.

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