Legal experts warn Meta's new terms still grant broad scraping permissions

Legal experts have cautioned that Meta's updated terms of service still grant extensive scraping permissions, potentially superseding robots.txt files. The company removed the word "train" from the list of allowed use cases for scraped content, but retained the ability to utilize that content for "advertising and business products."

This change, which took effect on October 30, has raised concerns among media and intellectual property attorneys. Matt Topic, an attorney specializing in media and intellectual property, expressed disappointment, stating that the revised terms still allow Meta to use scraped content to develop various business products, a term that remains unclear.

Meta currently lists its business products as ads, Meta Business Tools, and Meta Business Suite. The company claims it made the revisions due to ambiguity in the initial consolidation of terms regarding robots.txt preferences. However, a Meta spokesperson emphasized that news sites can still disable the crawler via robots.txt flags.

Three legal experts from Nieman Lab consulted for the story were skeptical about the revised terms, asserting that they remain too broad to restrict Meta's scraping activities.