Meta's New Terms Let It Train AI on Your Website for Free

Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, has updated its terms of service for business accounts. Starting October 30, if you have a business account that promotes content on Meta's platforms, you're agreeing to let Meta crawl and scrape your website. That means Meta can use automated software to access and collect content from your site, and then use that content to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models. This could include news articles, blog posts, product descriptions, and more.

Why does this matter to you? If you run a small business or a news site, your content could be used for free to make Meta's AI smarter, without you getting paid or even asked. Meta has struck paid licensing deals with some big news outlets, but this policy could let it bypass those deals and take content from anyone with a business account. Legal experts say Meta might argue these terms override a site's robots.txt file, which is a standard way to tell web crawlers not to scrape your site. Meta disputes this, saying it's just consolidating ad terms and that robots.txt still works.

Meta's spokesperson says the change is about pulling accurate product information for ads, not about scraping news sites. But critics point out that Meta recently started charging businesses to post links, while now claiming the right to crawl those same links for free. If you don't agree to the new terms, Meta says it may stop your access to its products for business purposes. So for many businesses, it's take it or leave it.

The catch: Meta says robots.txt still works, but legal experts warn the new terms could be used to argue otherwise. If you're a publisher or business owner, you might want to review your Meta business account and consider whether you're comfortable with this. For everyone else, it's a reminder that the content you see online might be feeding AI models without the creator's consent.