So this week I actually read a terms of service agreement. All the way through. I know, I know, mark the calendar.
I'd seen a few tweets (do we still call them that? whatever) flying around about Zoom quietly giving itself permission to train AI models on customer audio, video, and chat content, and I figured it was one of those overblown internet freakouts that happens every other week. Then I went and read the actual language myself, buried a good ways down in the terms of service under the "customer content" section, and yeah, it's real, or was real until Zoom walked a chunk of it back this week after enough people made noise about it.
The wording basically let Zoom use stuff you say and type in meetings to train its machine learning and AI features, and the opt-out situation was murky at best. For a company that spent 2020 through 2022 selling itself to every business on earth as the trustworthy, secure way to have your meetings (remember the whole "Zoombombing" security overhaul they did?), quietly rewriting the rules to hoover up meeting content for model training is a genuinely bad look. I use Zoom probably four or five times a week for client calls. Some of those calls have stuff on them I would not want anywhere near a training dataset — pricing negotiations, half-finished ideas, a client venting about their business partner for ten straight minutes. None of that is mine to consent away, and I never explicitly agreed to any of it beyond clicking "I agree" back when I signed up in like 2020 and did not read a word.
Zoom's public statement this week says they won't use audio, video, or chat content to train AI without customer consent, and that they've updated the terms to make that clearer. Fine. Good, even. But it only happened because the story caught fire online, not because anyone at Zoom woke up one morning and decided consent mattered. That's the part that bugs me more than the clause itself. The pattern is so familiar at this point: quietly expand what you're allowed to do, wait and see if anyone notices, walk it back loudly and apologetically if they do, keep the parts nobody complained about. I don't think that's some uniquely evil Zoom thing, either — it's just what happens when a piece of software becomes infrastructure. Nobody reads the terms of a tool they use forty hours a week. I sure didn't, until this week.
The other thing nagging at me is how normal this has quietly become across basically every product I use. Every note-taking app, every "smart" keyboard, every customer service chat widget seems to have some line somewhere about using your data to improve or train models. Most of them, I'd bet, have similar clauses I've never bothered to check because reading legal text for forty different apps isn't how I want to spend my Tuesday. I'm not about to go audit every terms of service page in my life. That's not realistic and honestly it's a little bit of a cop-out that companies get to hide behind "well it was in the terms" as if that settles the ethics of it.
I don't have some grand policy proposal here. I just think if a company wants my meeting recordings feeding a model, they should have to ask me directly, in plain language, with an actual choice attached, not slip it into paragraph whatever of a document nobody opens. That's a pretty low bar and most companies still can't clear it.
Anyway. I switched a couple of recurring client calls over to Google Meet this week just to have options, not because I think Meet is some privacy paradise (it's Google, come on), but because I like having a backup that isn't tied to one vendor's decisions about my own conversations. Small thing. Probably won't matter much in six months. But I felt like doing something with my hands about it instead of just complaining into a blog post, even though, judging by this post, apparently I also needed to do that.
If you use Zoom for work and haven't looked at how your account is set up around this, it's worth five minutes. There's usually a toggle in your account settings, not just the terms of service page, that controls some of this. Go check it. I had to hunt for mine.