Meta’s updated commercial terms, which take effect October 30, let it crawl the websites linked to any business account and use what it finds to develop and train its products, and the only way to opt out is to stop using Meta’s business tools. The terms also let Meta create “test credentials” to reach that content, which experts interviewed by Nieman Lab warned could get it past paywalls. Meta said it was only consolidating crawling language from older policies and that site owners can still block its crawlers with robots.txt. But the older terms limited crawling to specific uses like generating ads, and experts warned the new language could let Meta train on publishers’ work without paying for a license. Well, it’s plausible. They really are the worst.
