A forthcoming update to Meta\u2019s terms of service allows Meta \u201cor any entity acting on our behalf\u201d to scrape the websites of any business using a Meta service for commercial purposes.<\/p>\n
Meta already scrapes the web on a titanic scale, so the expanded terms seem like a maneuver to shore up the company\u2019s legal footing as it stakes its future on web-browsing agents like its Muse AI agent. The broad terms could allow Meta to index business sites for Muse to navigate or for its advertising business, or train Muse on how real commercial operations are laid out at the same time Meta is pitching Muse as an all-purpose business agent<\/a>.<\/p>\n According to Ars Technica<\/a>, the move could allow Meta to dodge many millions of dollars in content-licensing fees, while Nieman Lab<\/a> reported the new terms potentially gate news organizations\u2019 access to Meta audiences on platforms like Facebook on the contractual condition they let Meta scrape their websites and use the content.<\/p>\n The update rolls out Oct. 30 and covers any website \u201cassociated with\u201d any of a commercial user\u2019s products or services (another sweeping claim). Meta defines commercial users<\/a> as accounts that advertise, market, sell or list products, develop apps, create or use product catalogs, manage a Page or business Group, or use any business product, such as the Meta Business Suite, which lets companies manage all of their accounts from one console. One can imagine this would give Meta scraping rights to an impressive swathe of the open web.<\/p>\n The new clause reads:<\/p>\n 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market,\u201d Loevy & Loevy media and intellectual property attorney Matt Topic told Nieman Lab. \u201cIt\u2019s not clear whether a court would enforce this, but publishers should assume that it would be enforceable.\u201d<\/p>\n Cornell Law School professor of digital and information law James Grimmelmann told Nieman Lab the update \u201cclearly represents permission to Meta to train AI on any content from their sites and possibly to deploy some of that content, even in competition with the publishers themselves.\u201d The broadest interpretation, he said, would allow Meta to systematically pull and archive news articles and serve them to users as content however the company wishes. Grimmelmann also argued the \u201ctest credentials\u201d phrasing would allow Meta to register for sites to gain access to gated content. It doesn\u2019t take a genius to realize that could extend to content behind paywalls.<\/p>\n Meta also recently implemented Meta One, a paid subscription service that\u2019s really more of a way for Meta to charge some Facebook and Instagram users money to bypass new external link limits. Nieman Lab argued, \u201cPut another way, Meta has begun charging users to post links to the same content that it will be permitted to crawl for free.\u201d Meta has granted some publishers an exemption from the program, at least for now<\/a>.<\/p>\n Notably, Meta declined to answer Nieman Lab\u2019s questions about Meta One or bypassing paywalls. According to Ars Technica, a Meta spokesperson said that the \u201ctest credentials\u201d language previously appeared in its Seller Agreement, but Ars pointed out that policy seemed narrowly tailored to seller-provided URLs submitted specifically to optimize their listings.<\/p>\n Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote on X<\/a> that a Techmeme summary of Nieman Lab\u2019s account was \u201cfalse,\u201d adding that Meta\u2019s use of web crawlers remains the same and content owners \u201ccan use robots.txt flags to indicate their preferences.\u201d He added the update is to \u201cmake sure we\u2019re able to pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when making on-platform ad and content recommendations, not about scraping news sites.\u201d<\/p>\n However, Search Engine Journal<\/a> noted that Meta\u2019s terms already allowed for scraping advertiser sites, including for training. It\u2019s just the October update that \u201creaches businesses that don\u2019t buy ads,\u201d the site wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cMeta\u2019s new commercial terms of use are outrageous and probably illegal,\u201d News\/Media Alliance president and CEO Danielle Coffey wrote in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen 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,\u201d Santa Clara University School of Law associate dean for research and professor of law Eric Goldman told The Register. \u201cOtherwise it\u2019s just Hobson\u2019s choice<\/a> or Morton\u2019s fork<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Goldman added that there are questions around whether this extension to existing business relations is enforceable, and while Meta may be acting in good faith, \u201cMeta has no reservoir of good faith among the community that it can draw upon.\u201d Giving Meta the benefit of the doubt is something he \u201cjust can\u2019t do\u2026 anymore,\u201d Goldman said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A forthcoming update to Meta\u2019s terms of service allows Meta \u201cor any entity acting on our behalf\u201d to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":931522,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[1694,256,17162,254,255,64,63,99,2456,1202,18609,1333,135034,105,2641],"class_list":["post-931521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-advertising","tag-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-facebook","tag-instagram","tag-messenger","tag-meta","tag-muse","tag-technology","tag-whatsapp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=931521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/931522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=931521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=931521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=931521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}