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.” 

Google was praised for “defending freedom” when it refused to comply with an order to remove the controversial “Innocence of Muslims” video from its services. Google ultimately won a decision allowing it to keep the video online, leading “[e]veryone from technology companies to Hollywood to free speech advocates [to] breathe a sigh of relief.”

Facing a problem of “toxic” and abusive behavior, developer Riot Games came to a simple solution: make the chat feature opt-in for users. According to Riot, a week after the change was made “negative chat saw a decrease by 32.7 percent [and] positive chat went up, by 34.5 percent.” Riot was praised for effectively addressing its problems by “creating a simple hurdle to abusive behavior.”

Facebook was applauded for enhancing user security when it launched its own “Tor hidden service” providing privacy- and security-conscious users an alternative way to reach its service. Facebook connected users running Tor software to a version of the site with extra safeguards for protecting users’ identities and their activity on site. Academics and the press embraced the new offering as a “first-of-its-kind” innovation and an “unalloyed good.”