Meta removes commercial-terms language that raised website-scraping and AI-training concerns
The Menlo Park company says the crawling terms only ever applied to its ads and business products.
Meta has removed a provision from its updated commercial terms that legal experts said could have let it use content from any business account holder’s websites to develop and train its products, including AI models. The clause covered “any content from [a business account’s] domains, web pages, or URLs.”
“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 in a statement. “It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”
Publishers had raised concerns that the wording could cover any site run by a business with a Meta account. Meta had earlier said the update did not reflect any change in how it crawls the web.
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