Meta has removed a controversial provision from its commercial terms of use. The language had stated that Meta could "use any content from [a business account’s] domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of" Meta products and services.
Legal experts had reportedly described this as a "remarkable provision" that could allow Meta to scrape websites of publishers with Meta business accounts and use the content for AI model training. A Meta spokesperson had previously insisted that the updated terms did not change how Meta crawls the web.
In a statement, Meta clarified that the consolidated crawling terms only applied to its ads and business products. The company stated, "It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers."