Meta commercial terms authorize crawling of business users’ websites

Meta’s updated commercial terms, scheduled to take effect October 30, authorize the company or entities acting on its behalf to automatically access and crawl websites associated with a business user’s products or services. The same clause says content collected from those sites may be used to develop, research and train Meta products.

For publishers using Meta products for business, the clause says Meta may collect content from associated sites and use it for the listed purposes. The reviewed evidence does not establish that Meta has begun crawling publisher sites or training products on publisher content under the update.

An examination of the notice found no option for business accounts to opt out before the effective date. The notice instead tells users who disagree to stop accessing or using Meta products for business or commercial purposes.

The language authorizes automated software, including scrapers, bots and crawlers, to access, index, cache, analyze, collect or retrieve domains, pages and URLs associated with a business user’s products or services. A crawler visits web pages and collects information without requiring a person to open each page. The clause also covers content made available through a business or its users’ use of Meta products and allows Meta to periodically retrieve updates.

The provision mentions creating test credentials as part of that access. It does not establish that Meta will use such credentials to bypass registration walls or paywalls. Meta did not answer whether test credentials could be used to access paid material.

Meta said the revision does not change how it uses web crawlers. It described the update as a consolidation of crawling language that had appeared across other terms. The company also said content owners can continue to indicate crawler-access preferences through robots.txt, a file publishers use to tell automated systems which areas of a site they may access.

The interaction between those technical instructions and consent asserted through the commercial terms remains unresolved. Legal experts consulted for the examination said Meta could argue that the contract supersedes other blocking instructions, but that is an interpretation rather than an established legal result. The provision’s enforceability and fair-use questions around any AI training also remain unsettled.