UK investigates Facebook and WhatsApp terms

META - the company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and more - is under investigation by the UK's monopolies regulator. The Competition and Markets Authority announced on 30 October that it is looking into “whether Meta holds a dominant position in one or more relevant markets in the UK” and “if so, whether its existing commercial terms, or revisions to those terms, amount to an abuse of that position.”

This cams just two weeks after Meta announced that, as The Register put it, it “grants itself right to scrape content from business customers for model training”. The revised terms and conditions were due to come into effect on 30 October, but that appears to have been postponed until 20 November. They indeed purport to give Meta the right to scrape and ingest content “that you share, post or upload on or in connection” with using any of Meta's products, including advertising tools, if you are a business.

You may observe that the Freelance has no facility for posting to Facebook or WhatsApp or Instagram. We thought about it, but lost the will to go on soon after starting to check whether the previous terms and conditions for using their snippet of program code tried to claim something like this. We feel vindicated in our lack of diligence.

© Mike Holderness