Industry
Meta drops publisher scraping clause from commercial terms
Meta updated its commercial terms to remove language permitting the company to scrape partner website domains and URLs for artificial intelligence model training.
Meta has revised its commercial terms to strike clauses that granted the company broad rights to crawl external websites for model development. The previous text stated that Meta could use content from linked domains, web pages, or URLs to build and improve its artificial intelligence systems. That provision drew sharp resistance from publishers and enterprise clients concerned about automated data harvesting.
The company confirmed the removal after facing days of industry backlash over intellectual property exposure. Despite the contract modifications, a Meta spokesperson stated that the revised terms do not represent an operational change in how the company crawls the public web. The change nonetheless curtails Meta's contractual claims to third-party domains connected through its business platforms.