Meta changed the web scraping clause in its commercial agreement following criticism

Meta changed the Business Terms text that will take effect on October 30, 2026. The company removed the sentence from the agreement saying that content collected from sites linked to business accounts could be used to train Meta products. The new text appeared on the company’s legal site as of October 17, after intense criticism on October 16.

What was the source of the controversy?

The Business Terms govern the use of Meta products for business or commercial purposes. They cover a broad area, from advertising and marketing messages to product catalogs, from page and group management to using Ads Manager and Meta Business Suite. In the previous version of the agreement, business users granted Meta’s automated software permission to crawl their sites and use this content to develop, research, and train the company’s products.

This statement in the version published on October 16 prompted a reaction from the News/Media Alliance. The organization said the text gave Meta the ability to scrape content from any site associated with a business account on the platform and train its AI products with that content. The fact that news sites also fell within this scope expanded the controversy.

What changed in the new text?

The revised clause preserves Meta’s authority to use automated software and create test credentials. The company can index, cache, analyze, and regularly update the domain names, pages, and URLs associated with the business user’s products or services.

The change was made to the purpose of this activity. The new text limits crawling to providing, developing, improving, researching, and maintaining advertising and business products, and to protecting the integrity and security of Meta products. The statement indicating that content would be used for model training no longer appears. The same change also appears in the preview of the Self-Serve Advertising Terms that will take effect on October 30.

Agreement consolidation and acceptance condition

With this update, Meta is bringing multiple agreements relating to advertising and business products under a single text. The terms state that continuing to use the products for business purposes after the update means accepting the new text. Users who do not accept are said to need to completely stop accessing the products for business or commercial purposes.

The change does not mean that Meta has completely abandoned its approach to collecting data for AI training. The company continues to obtain authorization in other provisions for data accessed through its own products and services. However, the scope of crawling authority for business sites is now limited to advertising and business products. There is time until October 30 for the terms to take effect, and the text may change again by that date.

Source: Unite.AI