Meta commercial terms effective Oct 30, 2026 authorize scraping of business customers' websites for AI training, with no opt-out
Meta will update its commercial terms on October 30, 2026, authorizing the company or anyone acting on its behalf to scrape content from websites associated with business customers and use it to train AI models and improve its products. "Business customer" is defined broadly: it covers advertisers, sellers, app developers, Page and Group managers, and users of Ads Manager or Meta Business Suite. The News/Media Alliance says there is no opt-out, since the only alternative is to stop using Meta's products, and calls the terms "outrageous and probably illegal". Meta reportedly plans to let businesses control its crawlers through robots.txt, but the contract contains no such commitment. Meta did not respond to The Register's request for comment.
Technical Details
- The terms authorize automated tools (web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents) to access, index, cache, analyse, collect, retrieve and crawl domains, pages and URLs linked to a business's products or services, and to periodically pull updates.
- The terms also authorize Meta to create test credentials to access content.
- Collected content may be used to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain Meta products, services and features.
- Robots.txt compliance is not guaranteed by the contract, and the law does not always require crawlers to honor it, so businesses must rely on Meta to respect their preferences.
- At least one million businesses already use Meta's AI agents in WhatsApp and Messenger, and almost every news publisher has at least one Meta business account.
Remediation
- Review the new commercial terms before October 30, 2026.
- Audit your own robots.txt to see what it actually allows and blocks.
- Assess the copyright and intellectual property exposure of content on domains tied to Meta business accounts.
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Meta commercial terms effective Oct 30, 2026 authorize scraping of business customers' websites for AI training, with no opt-out
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Meta will update its commercial terms on October 30, 2026, authorizing the company or anyone acting on its behalf to scrape content from websites associated with business customers and use it to train AI models and improve its products. "Business customer" is defined broadly: it covers advertisers, sellers, app developers, Page and Group managers, and users of Ads Manager or Meta Business Suite. The News/Media Alliance says there is no opt-out, since the only alternative is to stop using Meta's products, and calls the terms "outrageous and probably illegal". Meta reportedly plans to let businesses control its crawlers through robots.txt, but the contract contains no such commitment. Meta did not respond to The Register's request for comment.
Technical Details
- The terms authorize automated tools (web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers and user agents) to access, index, cache, analyse, collect, retrieve and crawl domains, pages and URLs linked to a business's products or services, and to periodically pull updates.
- The terms also authorize Meta to create test credentials to access content.
- Collected content may be used to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain Meta products, services and features.
- Robots.txt compliance is not guaranteed by the contract, and the law does not always require crawlers to honor it, so businesses must rely on Meta to respect their preferences.
- At least one million businesses already use Meta's AI agents in WhatsApp and Messenger, and almost every news publisher has at least one Meta business account.
Remediation
- Review the new commercial terms before October 30, 2026.
- Audit your own robots.txt to see what it actually allows and blocks.
- Assess the copyright and intellectual property exposure of content on domains tied to Meta business accounts.