Meta Revises Terms of Service Update After Data Scraping Concerns

Meta has narrowed the language in its forthcoming Terms of Service update after an outcry over provisions that appeared to authorize broad scraping of business websites. According to The Verge, the company revised the terms over the weekend to clarify that the crawling language applied only to its advertising and business products. The changes follow criticism from legal experts and business owners who said the original wording could have justified widespread data collection.

The dispute began earlier this month when Stephen Beale of The Steampunk Explorer flagged new language in Meta's updated agreement that seemed to extend beyond its existing terms on scraping data to train AI systems. The provisions stated that businesses continuing to use Meta's platforms after Oct. 30 authorize the company to use automated software — including scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents — and to create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve or crawl domains, web pages and URLs tied to their products or services. The terms also granted permission to periodically pull updates from those pages for Meta's training and research.

Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts told The Verge that the company had listened to the feedback. He said the consolidated crawling terms applied only to ads and business products, that the clarification does not change how Meta uses web crawlers, and that content owners can continue to signal their preferences through robots.txt. Roberts added that the update is not about scraping news sites and does not grant rights that supersede those preferences.

The revisions address concerns reported by Nieman Lab, where legal experts said the terminology could be used to justify sweeping collection of business data, leaving companies with little recourse beyond shutting down their Meta accounts before the deadline. Meta has faced multiple lawsuits over data scraping and the use of copyright-protected works in training its AI tools, and the updated terms appeared to offer the company more legal cover in such cases. Meta AI's handling of third-party information has been a recurring question in those disputes.

Even after the rewrite, the provisions still allow Meta to gather data from business websites to help power its ad targeting process, according to the report. Businesses that keep using Meta's platforms past Oct. 30 will be bound by the revised agreement.