In its revision, published Friday afternoon, Meta removed the word “train” from a list of allowed use cases and limited those uses to “advertising and business products,” rather than all Meta products. But the revised terms will still allow for broad scraping of websites, potentially superseding robots.txt files, according to legal experts.
On Saturday, a Meta spokesperson said the company revised the terms because “it wasn’t clear in the initial consolidation of terms that robots.txt preferences are respected. News sites, like all other content owners, still have the ability to disable the crawler via robots.txt flags. That has been the case, and it has not changed.”
Meta has not included any specific language about respecting robots.txt preferences in its revised terms of service. The new terms are slated to go into effect on October 30. There is no option for business accounts to opt out of the new terms before then.
“I think publishers should remain concerned,” said Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy. “The revised version of the new terms still allows Meta to use that scraped content to develop any ‘business product.’ That doesn’t seem to be a defined term, and presumably Meta is developing AI business products. I think ‘develop’ is broad enough to include ‘train.'”
Meta currently lists examples of its business products as “ads, Meta Business Tools and Meta Business Suite.”
