Meta Removes Business Terms Language That Raised Website Scraping Concerns
After legal experts questioned a clause in its commercial terms, Meta pulled it and said its crawling practices have not changed.
Meta has removed new language from its commercial terms of use that critics said could let it use the websites of business account holders to train AI, according to TechCrunch. The updated terms said Meta could use content from a business account's domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain its products and services.
TechCrunch says legal experts quoted by Nieman Lab called this a "remarkable provision" that could let Meta scrape the sites of any publisher with a Meta business account and use that content for AI models. Meta first said the update did not change how it crawls the web. The Verge then reported the clause had been removed.
Meta later told TechCrunch that the crawling terms it consolidated only applied to its ads and business products, and that the change does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. TechCrunch notes it did not describe any specific action business users must take.
If you run ads or a business page on Meta, it is worth reading the current commercial terms yourself, since the wording changed once already. If your website holds original content you care about, decide what you are comfortable with and check your site's crawler settings.
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