Column: These apps and websites use your data to train AI. You’re probably using one right now.

Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks in 2018. Furthermore, the web trawlers looking for data aren’t supposed to penetrate paywalls or any websites requiring passwords for entry, so putting your site under lock and key will keep it from AI adoption. Customer hereby grants us the right to use, during and after the Subscription Term, aggregated and anonymized Customer Data to improve the Services, including to train our algorithms internally through machine learning techniques.” In other words, you’re handing Grammarly AI training material every time you check your spelling. And it insists that the kind of machine learning it’s interested in is what’s known as on-device AI — instead of taking your data and adding it to large data sets stored on the cloud, its automated systems live locally on the chips in your device. Here’s the part that still remains very much in effect, every time you boot up Zoom: “You agree to grant and hereby grant Zoom a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary to redistribute, publish, import, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content.” In other words, they can do just about anything they want with our private recorded conversations, except for training AI without our consent.