I want to talk about something that happened last week that genuinely surprised me: people read a Terms of Service agreement. Not skimmed it, not screenshotted a meme about it — actually read the thing, section by section, and got mad about specific clauses.
The document in question was Zoom's. Somewhere around August 7th a bunch of people (including, apparently, a lot of lawyers who have nothing better to do on a Monday) noticed that Zoom's updated terms, the ones that quietly took effect back in late July, had language in section 10.4 that sure sounded like Zoom was giving itself permission to use your call audio, video, and chat transcripts to train AI models. Not just "we might use anonymized aggregate data" language. The actual wording was broad enough that a room full of contract lawyers spent a weekend arguing about what "customer content" legally meant.
By Monday the backlash was loud enough that Zoom put out a blog post insisting they dont use your audio or video to train AI without consent, and by Friday theyd gone back and rewritten section 10.4 to spell that out explicitly instead of leaving it to interpretation. Which, fine, good outcome. But I keep thinking about the fact that it took a viral screenshot to get a multi-billion dollar company to clarify something that basic. Im on Zoom calls four, five times a day most weeks, client stuff, one recurring 8am standup I genuinely hate, and I never once thought to check what happens to the recording after I hang up.
Heres my actual opinion on this, not just a recap: Im tired of "we updated our terms to better reflect our practices" as a euphemism for "we got caught." Companies do this constantly now. They ship a policy change nobody notices, wait to see if anyone complains, and if enough people do, they walk it back and call it a clarification instead of an admission. Zoom didnt do anything uniquely evil here, honestly, I think this is closer to sloppy lawyering than some grand AI data-harvesting scheme, but the pattern itself is what bugs me. Go read the versioning on any big platforms terms sometime. Its a graveyard of quiet reversals nobody notices until someone screenshots one.
Meanwhile, over on the Threads side of the internet, the numbers came out this week too and theyre rough. Daily active users reportedly dropped something like 70% from where they were at launch a month ago. I was pretty into Threads for the first ten days, mostly because it felt like everyone I used to follow on the other app showed up all at once, and then I just stopped opening it. No specific reason. It didnt have anything for me to do once the novelty wore off. No trending topics, no real search, nothing to click into that wasnt just a feed. Twitter, sorry, "X" now apparently, is still a mess but at least its a mess with a search bar that works.
Small tangent because Im allowed one: my coffee maker broke this week. The plastic reservoir finally cracked after seven years of hard water. I spent forty minutes comparison shopping electric kettles instead of doing any of the actual work I had planned for the day, and ended up with a $19.99 Hamilton Beach one from the Target on Route 9. Its fine. Its a kettle. I genuinely do not know why that took forty minutes.
Anyway, back to the terms of service thing, because I think its worth remembering next time some app pushes an update notification at 11pm that youd normally just tap through without reading. Somewhere in there is probably a line about what they can do with whatever you upload. Most of us wont read it until someone else does first and gets loud about it on our behalf, which is a strange system when you actually think about it. Not strange enough that Im going to start reading every EULA myself, to be clear. Im not made of that kind of patience. Im just saying its worth somebody doing it, and this week it happened to be a bunch of very online lawyers with a Sunday to kill.
One more small thing worth mentioning before I close the laptop: Russia launched its Luna-25 probe last week, its first Moon mission attempt since the 1970s, aiming for a landing near the lunar south pole. Its still en route as Im writing this, no result yet either way. Feels like an odd, quiet story to have sitting right next to a Terms of Service scandal on the same news day, but that's kind of what August is like. A little bit of everything, none of it fully resolved.