Meta grants itself right to scrape content from business customers for model training

Businesses using Facebook commercially may want to think twice about what information they share online. At the end of the month, Meta plans to introduce terms that would authorize it to collect content from websites associated with its business customers and use it to train AI models or otherwise improve its products. The ad biz has revised its commercial terms of service, and the new contractual language takes effect on October 30, 2026. There are at least a million businesses using the company's AI agents in WhatsApp and Messenger, to say nothing of other services like Instagram, Facebook, its widely used advertising service, or its less widely used business suite. As noted by Nieman Lab, almost every news publisher has at least one Meta business account. Meta defines business customers as those "using ads or marketing messages, selling or listing products, developing apps, creating or using a product catalog, managing a Page, managing a Group for business purposes, using any business product, such as Ads Manager or Meta Business Suite." The added language grants Meta the right to use automated software with created credentials to scrape customer content and use it for the enhancement of its products, including AI models. You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users' use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms. Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, condemned Meta's move. "Meta's new commercial terms of use are outrageous and probably illegal," she said in a statement. "The company's decision to withhold access to its audience unless businesses allow Meta to scrape content from their websites is an appalling, bad-faith policy, and a clear abuse of the company's market power. It cannot be allowed to be implemented on October 30." Coffey said any business with intellectual property and a Meta account should question what these terms allow. Eric Goldman, associate dean for research and professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law, told The Register in an interview that Meta's revised terms of service raise both procedural and substantive issues. While it's already commonplace for businesses to change their contractual terms after customers sign up, he said, applying these changes to customers who already have a multifaceted relationship with Meta can be challenging. "When I talk to my students about how to amend [terms of service agreements], I say that you have to give users a bona fide option to reject the terms," he explained. "Otherwise it's just Hobson's choice or Morton's fork." For example, he said, if Meta's business customers have prepaid for anything, is the only option to avoid these terms to end the business relationship, and if so, is Meta prepared to refund the prepaid fees? The procedural issue, he said, is what this does to existing business relationships and how it can be properly enforced as a change to existing terms. Then in terms of the substance of the change, Goldman said that, while he's inclined to assume those drafting contracts do so in good faith, "Meta has no reservoir of good faith among the community that it can draw upon." Meta's history of sacrificing user privacy and mental health, as documented in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the social media addiction settlement with 52 state attorneys general, drained that reservoir in the course of the company's 22-year history of data harvesting. Goldman said that it's easy to assume the worst possible interpretation of Meta's contractual language because the company has "disrespected our trust so often." He added that while news reports have indicated that Meta intends to allow businesses to signal their crawling preferences through robots.txt directives, that's not spelled out. "That all sounds great, but the language doesn't expressly say that Meta will respect those robots.txt instructions," he said. "The law doesn't necessarily compel anyone to respect robots.txt files. And now we're back to the good faith/bad faith scenario." Goldman said there have been past terms of service controversies, like GeoCities in 1999 and Instagram in 2012, that haven't led to disaster. "The drafters [in those instances] had some particular problem they were trying to solve, but in drafting around that problem may not have been careful enough to avoid grabbing rights that really set people off," he said. "This looks a lot like that to me. But again, that's actually giving Meta the presumption of good faith. And I just can't do that anymore." Meta did not respond to a request for comment.(R)