Meta has changed the wording of its upcoming Terms of Service update after concerns that new provisions could allow the company to scrape the website of any business with a Facebook Page. The revised terms take effect on Oct. 30, and the clarification follows criticism from legal experts and industry observers.
Earlier this month, Stephen Beale of The Steampunk Explorer noted that the new language appeared to go beyond Meta’s existing terms on data scraping for training its AI-powered systems.
What the Original Terms Said
Under the earlier wording, businesses that continued using Meta’s platforms after Oct. 30 would authorize it to use automated tools such as web scrapers, bots and crawlers. These could access, index, cache, analyze and collect domains, web pages and URLs associated with their products or services. The terms also allowed Meta to periodically pull updates from those sources for training and research.
Meta has faced several lawsuits over data scraping and the use of copyright-protected works in AI training, and the wording appeared to give it more legal cover. Nieman Lab reported that legal experts warned the language could justify widespread scraping of business data, leaving shutting down Meta accounts before the deadline as the only recourse.
Meta’s Response
Over the weekend, Meta updated the terms to address the concerns. Spokesperson Daniel Roberts told The Verge that the consolidated crawling terms applied only to Meta’s ads and business products, and that this is now stated in the terms themselves. He said the update does not change how Meta uses web crawlers, that content owners can still use robots.txt to signal their preferences, and that the changes do not give Meta new rights overriding those preferences.
The clarification should reassure business users, though the provisions still allow Meta to gather data from business websites to support its ad targeting.