Meta removes web-scraping provision from commercial terms after legal experts object
Deleted language had claimed business accounts' web content for AI training and development, company calls the second edit a clarification
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Meta has removed a provision from its commercial terms of use that legal experts said could have allowed the company to scrape the websites of any publisher holding a Meta business account and use the content to train its AI models. The Verge reported the removal, which came after the language was flagged by lawyers interviewed by Nieman Lab.
The updated terms had stated that Meta could "use any content from [a business account's] domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of" Meta products and services. The experts described it as a "remarkable provision" — a sweeping licence tucked into boilerplate most businesses accept without reading. Nieman Lab's lawyers read it as permission to scrape any publisher with a Meta business account for AI training, a use the company has otherwise had to defend in court: Meta defeated a high-profile copyright lawsuit over its training data last year, while other suits against AI companies, including Meta, remain ongoing.
A Meta spokesperson insisted the terms never reflected a change in how Meta crawls the web. "We've heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we've clarified that in the terms themselves," the company said, adding that the edit "does not change how Meta uses web crawlers."
The sequence is the story. The language appeared without announcement, was found by outside lawyers rather than by Meta, and was removed the same way. A publisher that did not read the commercial terms during the interval has no way of knowing what it agreed to — or that it agreed to it. The rules governing how publisher content feeds Meta's models were changed not by policy announcement but by editing, twice, in documents few account holders ever open.
Meta maintains that nothing about its crawlers changed at any point. By the company's own account, its terms of use were rewritten twice to say the same thing.