ENCOURAGE USERS TO SPEAK FREELY

Promote diverse speech and speakers.

If your product or service allows users to interact with each other, it is in your best interest to encourage user expression. The more freedom your users have to express themselves freely, the more likely they are to interact deeply with your service, with lasting benefits to everyone involved.

GIVE USERS CONTROL OVER HOW THEIR CONTENT IS USED
Respecting your users’ contributions means respecting the legal rights they have in their content and their choices about how to engage with your service. Avoiding an aggressive stance on your ability to reuse users’ content and letting your users decide what to say on your service and when to say it may win you more users in the long run.
Case Study

Zoom Tries to Blur its Own Background—Quietly Changes Terms of Service to Allow AI to Train on User Information

Zoom failed to provide its users control over their personal information when it quietly updated its terms of service, requiring users to sacrifice their privacy in order to fuel Zoom’s artificial intelligence program.

Zoom failed to provide its users control over their personal information when it quietly updated its terms of service, requiring users to sacrifice their privacy in order to fuel Zoom’s artificial intelligence program. Specifically, the new terms of service required users to agree to “grant Zoom a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license” for various purposes, including “machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing, improvement of the Services, Software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software, or any combination thereof.” Users raised alarms and called on privacy advocates and legal experts to consider whether Zoom’s policy was acceptable in terms of consent, data privacy, and individual rights, with one user saying: “I'm afraid unless you give users the option to opt out of having their data used in training AI, we're going to have to boycott your product. Unless you can verify that video content itself is not used in training. This is horrible optics.” 

CLEARLY DISTINGUISH YOUR OWN SPEECH
Your company is entitled to express its own position. But it is important to make it clear when your company is speaking on its own behalf or simply relaying user expression. Making it easy for users to distinguish between the two can avoid incidents that erode trust in your product and company.
Case Study

LinkedIn Pays for Spamming Users’ Contact Lists

LinkedIn faced a class action lawsuit and the alienation of potential users for spamming contacts of its current users with invitations to join the service.

LinkedIn faced a class action lawsuit and the alienation of potential users for spamming contacts of its current users with invitations to join the service. Although LinkedIn did request permission to email these contacts, it failed to inform users that invitations would be sent repeatedly unless the recipient accepted or explicitly declined. LinkedIn ultimately paid $13 million in late 2015 to settle a class action lawsuit over the unexpected emails.

“Data portability has been identified as a procompetitive measure to empower consumers to choose among competing providers. Interoperability, on the other hand, can promote competition by allowing different systems to communicate with one another." Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2021.

Share This: