Meta has updated its business terms, effective October 30, following criticism from the publishing industry. The company removed specific language that previously suggested it could freely train artificial intelligence models on content from news websites.
Despite these changes, legal experts argue the revisions remain insufficient. James Grimmelmann, a professor at Cornell Law School, noted that the terms still include language allowing Meta to use content associated with products or services, which could still permit site scraping.
Attorney Matt Topic pointed out that the revised terms still allow Meta to use scraped data to develop business products. He suggests that the term develop is broad enough to encompass the training of AI models, leaving the original concerns largely unaddressed.
Meta maintains that the updated terms are not intended to facilitate the scraping of news sites. Company spokesperson Daniel Roberts stated that the new rules do not grant Meta rights that supersede instructions provided by content owners through robots.txt files.
