Isophoric News · Sunday, October 18, 2026
Meta revises new business terms, but legal experts say they still allow broad scraping
Meta removed the word "train" from new commercial terms that critics said would let it scrape websites linked to business accounts for AI, but legal experts told Nieman Lab the revised terms still allow broad scraping. The terms take effect Oct. 30 with no opt-out for business accounts, Nieman Lab reported, and now limit the uses to "advertising and business products"; a Meta spokesperson said the crawling terms "only applied to our ads and business products" and that this "does not change how Meta uses web crawlers." Cornell law professor James Grimmelmann said the new language is still "broad enough to drive a truck through," and Nieman Lab reports the revised terms contain no specific language about respecting robots.txt, the file site owners use to signal their crawling preferences, which Meta says content owners can still use.
