Meta to Literally Every Business User: Nice Website You Got There

A forthcoming update to Meta’s terms of service allows Meta “or any entity acting on our behalf” to scrape the websites of any business using a Meta service for commercial purposes.

Meta already scrapes the web on a titanic scale, so the expanded terms seem like a maneuver to shore up the company’s 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 .

According to Ars Technica , the move could allow Meta to dodge many millions of dollars in content-licensing fees, while Nieman Lab reported the new terms potentially gate news organizations’ access to Meta audiences on platforms like Facebook on the contractual condition they let Meta scrape their websites and use the content.

The update rolls out Oct. 30 and covers any website “associated with” any of a commercial user’s products or services (another sweeping claim). Meta defines commercial users 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.

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’ 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.

“This 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,” Loevy & Loevy media and intellectual property attorney Matt Topic told Nieman Lab. “It’s not clear whether a court would enforce this, but publishers should assume that it would be enforceable.”

Cornell Law School professor of digital and information law James Grimmelmann told Nieman Lab the update “clearly 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.” 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.