Meta has revised its upcoming terms of service for business accounts following criticism over broad scraping permissions. The company removed the word “train” from a list of allowed uses and narrowed the scope to “advertising and business products” rather than all Meta products, according to Nieman Lab.
However, legal experts warn the revision does not adequately address concerns. The new terms, set to take effect October 30, still authorize Meta to use “automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents)” to access and collect content from websites associated with business accounts. The scraped content can be used to “provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products.”
Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, stated: “The revised version of the new terms still allows Meta to use that scraped content to develop any ‘business product.’ That doesn’t seem to be a defined term, and presumably Meta is developing AI business products. I think ‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train.’” Meta lists examples of business products as “ads, Meta Business Tools and Meta Business Suite.”
James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, said the updated language remains overly broad: “While it adds more language about the permitted uses, ‘develop…advertising and business products’ is still broad enough to drive a truck through.”
Meta stated that robots.txt preferences are respected and that news organizations can disable the crawler via robots.txt flags, but the company has not included specific language about respecting robots.txt in the revised terms. Benjamin Sobel, a University of Wisconsin law professor, explained that robots.txt indicates preferences but compliance is voluntary and not legally enforceable.
Virtually every news organization maintains at least one Meta business account to manage Facebook Pages, Threads accounts, Instagram profiles, and WhatsApp channels. Journalism organizations have raised formal objections. The European Publishers Council announced it would petition E.U. telecommunications regulators. The UK News Media Association called for government intervention, with chief executive Theo Bamber describing it as a “shameless landgrab.” The News/Media Alliance, the largest U.S. news publishing trade association, called the update “outrageous and probably illegal.”
Key facts
- Meta removed ‘train’ from terms but narrowed rather than eliminated scraping permissions
- New terms allow scraped content use for undefined ‘business products’ that could include AI development
- Legal experts say ‘develop’ remains broad enough to encompass AI training
- Meta says robots.txt preferences are respected but has not added explicit language to the terms
- The revised terms take effect October 30 with no opt-out option for business accounts
- Major journalism organizations have formally objected and called for regulatory intervention