Meta rewrites the business-terms scraping language again — legal experts say it still does not settle the concern
From the AI digest for 2026-10-22
What happened: The Verge (Wednesday, October 22, ~4:32 PM ET) reports Meta has tweaked its business terms to remove language suggesting it could freely train its AI models on news sites — but legal experts say the changes are not enough to address their concerns. Cornell law professor James Grimmelmann, to Nieman Lab: "This does nothing to restrict the 'associated with your products or services' [language] that would let Meta scrape entire sites."
What's genuinely new: A second removal pass, and an expert-grade evaluation of it: the first removal (reported October 17) came a day after the scraping language surfaced, but nothing on the record until now assessed whether what replaced it was adequate. This coverage supplies the judgment — insufficient — and keeps the thread's consent-by-fine-print question open despite the headline-level reversal.
Watch: The final terms text at the ledgered October 30 effective date; whether the "associated with your products or services" construct survives into the operative terms; a named publisher test case; regulator/AG attention.
Links: The Verge