Meta has updated its commercial terms of service following public criticism. The company removed the word 'train' from the section describing how it uses content from business websites.
The revised policy now states that Meta may periodically pull updates from business sites to provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products.
Legal experts, including Matt Topic and James Grimmelmann, argue that the updated language remains broad. They suggest that the term 'develop' still allows Meta to use scraped data for AI products.
Meta maintains that its web crawling practices have not changed and that content owners can still use robots.txt files to signal their preferences regarding data scraping.
Industry groups, including the UK News Media Association, the European Publishers Council, and the US-based News/Media Alliance, have called on regulators to intervene against the new terms.
