POLICY · REGULATION · #2452
Experts: Meta business-terms update could still allow scraping news sites
Meta updated its business terms for business accounts effective Oct. 30; the company removed explicit language saying it would 'train' its products on site content, but legal experts say remaining phrases like 'develop' and 'associated with your products or services' could still be used to justify scraping and using news-site content for AI development. Meta says content owners can use robots.txt to signal preferences and that the update does not give new rights that supersede those preferences.
KEY POINTS
- Meta updated its business terms for business accounts effective Oct.
- 30; the company removed explicit language saying it would 'train' its products on site content, but legal experts say remaining phrases like 'develop' and 'associated with your products or services' could still be used to justify scraping and using news-site content for AI development.
- Meta says content owners can use robots.txt to signal preferences and that the update does not give new rights that supersede those preferences.
WHY IT MATTERS
The terms could affect publishers' ability to block automated scraping and thus influence what training data Meta can legally use for commercial AI products.