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Business accounts will consent to Meta scraping their websites Starting Oct. 30
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6 min read
Meta’s updated commercial terms, scheduled to take effect October 30, authorize the company and entities acting on its behalf to use automated tools to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, and crawl websites associated with business accounts on Meta platforms. The terms cover content on domains, pages, and URLs associated with a business’s products or services and say Meta may use collected content to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain its products and services. Meta defines “AI at Meta” as one of those products elsewhere in its terms. The change affects businesses using accounts to manage Facebook pages, Messenger accounts, Instagram profiles, WhatsApp channels, advertising, marketing messages, groups, or Meta’s business dashboard. Legal experts who reviewed the language said it could enable Meta to argue that it has permission to scrape news publishers’ websites and train AI systems on the material. They also said the terms’ authorization to create “test credentials” could potentially let Meta access content behind registration walls, though Meta did not say whether such credentials would be used to bypass paywalls. Business users cannot opt out while retaining commercial access; the terms instruct users who disagree to stop using Meta products for business or commercial purposes. Meta said the language consolidates previously scattered crawling provisions, will not change its future crawling practices, and leaves content owners able to manage crawler access through robots.txt.