Zoom May Spy on You (and Other Capitalist Bullshit)

Zoom updated its Terms of Service on Monday after a controversy over the company’s policies about training AI on user data. Although the policy literally says that Zoom reserves the right to train AI on your calls without your explicit permission, the Terms of Service now include an additional line which says, essentially, we promise not to do that.

The company’s Terms of Service call your video, audio, and chat transcripts “Customer Content.” When you click through Zoom’s terms, you agree to give Zoom “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights” to use that Customer Content for “machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing,” and a variety of other product development purposes. The company reserves similar rights for “Service Generated Data,” which includes telemetry data, product usage data, diagnostic data, and other information it gets from analyzing your content and behavior.

However, an update to the legal documents now contains a new clause, which appears in bold: “Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.”

When you use a free service, you're not the "customer", you're the "product". Even if you pay for some stuff (like newspapers). Of course, Zoom is going to listen in on your calls and harvest all the data that they can. They're not in business for their health or to do good for people.

H/T

In other capitalist news, the family that owns Subway is looking to cash out. One thing seems to be consistent in this life" When "private equity" buys a company, the quality of the product goes down as the vultures try to shave costs and the price goes up. (Not that Subway has been exactly a primo maker of grinders.) An open question will be whether or not Subway's new owners try to make their employees sign noncompete agreements, the way that they were making Jimmy John's workers do, before they got caught doing it.