The company says the change clarifies rules for ads and business products, not how its web crawlers operate.
Meta removed a provision from its commercial terms that said it could use content from a business account’s domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain its products, according to TechCrunch.
Legal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab said the earlier wording could have allowed Meta to scrape websites operated by publishers with Meta business accounts and use that material to train its artificial-intelligence models.
The provision has now been removed, The Verge reported. Meta said the change does not alter its web-crawling practices. “The crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products,” the company said, adding: “It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”
That separates two issues: what Meta’s commercial terms appeared to authorize, and what its systems actually collect from public websites. Removing the language may reduce uncertainty for businesses with Meta accounts, but it does not by itself show that Meta changed its data collection or AI-training practices.
The available reporting does not include the full replacement language, so businesses cannot yet tell from this account exactly what the revised terms say. It also does not establish whether Meta used content covered by the removed provision to train its models.
Businesses may still want to review Meta’s current terms and any available site-level controls. The reporting does not explain what controls, if any, businesses can use to limit or challenge Meta’s collection or use of public web content.