Legal experts warn Meta's new terms still grant broad scraping permissions

Legal experts warn Meta’s new terms still grant broad scraping permissions, despite language changes

Allowing scraped content to be used for all “advertising and business products” is a substantial expansion of Meta’s permissions.

In its revision, published Friday afternoon, Meta removed the word “train” from a list of allowed use cases and limited those uses to “advertising and business products,” rather than all Meta products. But the revised terms will still allow for broad scraping of websites, potentially superseding robots.txt files, according to legal experts.

On Saturday, a Meta spokesperson said the company revised the terms because “it wasn’t clear in the initial consolidation of terms that robots.txt preferences are respected. News sites, like all other content owners, still have the ability to disable the crawler via robots.txt flags. That has been the case, and it has not changed.”

Meta currently lists examples of its business products as “ads, Meta Business Tools and Meta Business Suite.”

Virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, which allows companies to manage Pages, Threads accounts, Instagram profiles, and WhatsApp channels from one place.

As of publication time, the section reads (with changes in bold):

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 in order to provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products (including business, commercial and related products to help you create and deliver ads and other commercial content, provide users information your products and services, and connect you with users who may be interested in your products and services) and maintain the integrity and security of Meta Company Products .

Here’s the original text :

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.

“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,” a spokesperson said in a statement, claiming publishers can still update their scraping preferences using robots.txt files. “This is not scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”

A Meta spokesperson said the company is incorporating its “ Ad Creative Generative AI Terms ” into its general commercial terms to make them easier to understand.

“[The update] doesn’t address my concerns,” said James Grimmelmann , a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School. “While it adds more language the permitted uses, [the] ‘develop…advertising and business products’ [language] is still broad enough to drive a truck through. This does nothing to restrict the ‘associated with your products or services’ [language] that would let Meta scrape entire sites.”

University of Wisconsin law professor Benjamin Sobel explained that robots.txt indicates a website’s preferences, but compliance with those is completely voluntary. He likened it to a homeowner putting up a sign saying, “Don’t look at my house.” Putting up that sign doesn’t give the homeowner an enforceable legal right to stop people from looking at the house.

“You can still express the preference, and unless it’s a legally enforceable preference, it can still be ignored all the same,” he said.

At least three journalism organizations have publicly raised concerns the forthcoming terms as a result of Nieman Lab’s reporting.

Prior to the update on Friday, the European Publishers Council announced that it would formally petition the E.U.’s telecommunications regulatory authorities and its executive body, the European Commission, to “ scrutinize these terms urgently, including their implications for copyright, contractual fairness and abuse of market power .”

The United Kingdom News Media Association , the trade organization representing British media, issued a statement on Friday calling for government officials to intervene.

“This shameless landgrab attempt from Meta to scrape anything and everything from news publishers and business websites to train their AI products is the worst kind of arrogant tech platform bullying,” said chief executive Theo Bamber . “We urgently need Ministers and regulators to stand up for British creators and the business community by calling out this outrageous behaviour and preventing Meta from setting this dreadful precedent.”

The News/Media Alliance — the largest news publishing trade association in the United States — denounced the terms, with president and CEO Danielle Coffey calling the update “ outrageous and probably illegal .”

“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,” Coffey said. “It cannot be allowed to be implemented on October 30.”

This story has been updated to include from Meta.

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