And that’s why I will probably never open a business. There’s too much dependence on these platforms and I don’t really see effective alternatives. If you know alternatives that actually work, please tell me. Especially for music, it’s almost all TikTok, Insta, Facebook nowadays. What a waste of life
The detail I found strangest is that reports say Meta intends to let businesses signal crawling preferences through robots.txt, but the terms don’t actually spell that out anywhere. So the one escape hatch people keep citing might not exist in the contract itself. It’s also an odd spot for paying customers — if you’ve prepaid ad spend and refuse the terms, do you just eat that loss to keep your product catalog out of training data? The refund question is where this gets teeth. The whole thing reads like a terms change where the only rational option is to shrug and accept it.
@joey_builds @technology I’m honestly unclear on why any business would integrate so deeply with a company like Facebook - a brand so toxic they had to change their name to hide who they are.
While I can’t tell you exactly how Facebook would abuse these business relationships, i can 100% guarantee they *will* abuse those relationships. The possibilities for bad behavior with agents integrated into businesses are obvious and dangerous.
I’m seeing that there may be some updates to the proposed TOS, but I haven’t checked yet…
“Oh, and make sure all your stuff is legal so we don’t get in trouble when we take it.”
You authorize us […] to […] create test credentials to […] crawl the domains […] associated with your products or services.
Meta may use any content […] to […] train […] Meta Company Products.
Basically, in exchange for being allowed to continue posting content on Facebook, you’re giving them permission from now on to aggressively scrape your own sites for content to train their models.
To quote a famous Sith Lord: “I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.”
No way this goes through in the EU. Frankly this should be against the law in any country. It’s one thing to say “Whatever you do on our platform belongs to us”, but it’s a whole other thing to do this.
And then they’re going to whine about the EU waging war against the US again.
Please let me out of this universe, I’ll try a parallel one.
Yes, I think the TOS says this only applies in the US.
Meta says it can steal any of your business ideas, business processes, and business technologies for its own use and not pay you.
Amazon does this by reserving the right to sublicense any/all products listed on their 3rd party marketplace. Even if it’s the manufacturer selling d2c on Amazon.
Depending on what kind of products you mean, licensing might be required for them to do their job. The same way as when you upload an image to a social network, you automatically give them a license to display said image.
(I don’t use Amazon so idk if they sell digital goods.)
Not ever remotely surprising
Meta being Meta. No surprise there.
News are posted elsewhere.
I mean, this is fine. The “content” most businesses publish where meta can see it is all sanitized advertising nonsense anyway. This will create for meta the least useful ad generator; assuming that such a thing could actually be useful.
To be clear, this is not restricted to content posted on Facebook. It’s any content posted on any website owned by the customer.
And specifically gives Meta the right to create “test credentials” on sites and scrape resultant deep content such as product docs that are only available with an account. This is far more invasive and concerning than traditional site scraping and indexing.(refs: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/16/meta-grants-itself-right-to-scrape-content-from-business-customers-for-model-training/5303658 , https://m.facebook.com/legal/commercial_terms_preview )
“test credentials” just reads to me as them giving themselves permission to straight up pen test every business with a social media account.
Very tempting to take a list of IP address ranges such as https://networksdb.io/ip-addresses-of/meta-platforms-inc and add them to our WAF blocklist, since I assume they won’t be honest about their user agent string when scraping.
Except there’s no guarantee they’ll be coming from one of their own IP addresses. There’s nothing to stop them from using a residential botnet.
All too true, unfortunately. No honor among thieves!
Not aware of Meta being used for work.
Its been a thing for… Quite a long time now. At least 10 years.
One of the first big intrusions I remember was “check in here on Facebook for WiFi access!”.
Horrifying even then.
Plenty of companies have social media accounts for advertising and support.
Grants itself rights. Sounds so much like… every government.
