from Hacker News

How Zoom’s terms of service and practices apply to AI features

by chrononaut on 8/7/23, 4:59 PM with 179 comments

• by berbec on 8/7/23, 6:44 PM

  This is a nice statement, but the TOS is the important part, not what this marketing piece says.

  > 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 and to perform all acts with respect to the Customer Content.

  > (ii) for the purpose of product and service development, marketing, analytics, quality assurance, machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing, improvement of the Services, Software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software, or any combination thereof

• by autoexec on 8/7/23, 9:24 PM

  Zoom was proved as being dishonest and untrustworthy years ago (https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...) but companies never cared about the privacy of the people they forced to use the software and all the security problems and leaks that followed still didn't discourage people from using it. I doubt their mining of personal data for AI will stop people from using it either.

  Although there are a ton of alternatives out there they are all "too hard" or something, so since Zoom mostly works OK most of the time and is dead simple to use it will continue to win out over everything else.

  My position on Zoom hasn't changed since 2020: Anyone using Zoom will continue to get exactly what they deserve.

• by sean_hogle on 8/7/23, 10:10 PM

  Zoom's lawyers are trying to pull a fast one with these revised Terms. The new sentence on user consent being required to train AIs applies only to "Customer Content," not "Service Generated Data."

  In sec. 10.4, Zoom says "... Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent."

  Customer Content is defined in 10.1 and is broadly worded. But the first sentence of sec. 10.2 clearly states that "Customer Content" does NOT include "Service Generated Data."

  Therein lies the rub. "Service Generated Data" = "any telemetry data, product usage data, diagnostic data, and similar content or data that Zoom collects or generates in connection with your or your End Users’ use of the Services ...." (sec. 10.2).

  Zoom is allowed to use Service Generated Data for any purpose (sec. 10.2) because it is not "Customer Content."

  This "clarification" does nothing meaningful to assuage the serious data privacy concerns posed by Zoom's use of captured user video content.

• by gruez on 8/7/23, 6:08 PM

  Called it a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37022827

  It's baffling how many people in previous threads thought a company that gets most of its money from enterprise/business clients, will burn all their reputation by surreptitiously using client data to train their AI.

• by bluefishinit on 8/7/23, 7:51 PM

  > Section 10.2 covers that there is certain information about how our customers in the aggregate use our product — telemetry, diagnostic data, etc. This is commonly known as service generated data. We wanted to be transparent that we consider this to be our data so that we can use service generated data to make the user experience better for everyone on our platform.

  Well, I consider that to be my data and actually it is since I canceled our company's Zoom account when they adjusted their TOS. I'll take my data elsewhere.

• by littlestymaar on 8/7/23, 7:14 PM

  > As part of our commitment to transparency and user control

  Bold claim for a company that already lost a class action for deliberately lying to its users.

• by kornhole on 8/7/23, 10:09 PM

  Nextcloud Talk has no TOS AFAIK. It is FOSS and self-hosted. Nextcloud AI tools run on your instance with the exception of the optional OpenAI plugin app. They are developing further FOSS AI models to replace those. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14gSiyAl9Fw

• by synaesthesisx on 8/7/23, 9:53 PM

  I wonder if they allow opting-out. My last company was in the healthcare space, and we used Zoom for all internal communication. Often this could contain sensitive information (PII etc) which would likely be a privacy violation if exposed.

• by codexb on 8/7/23, 9:11 PM

  It was a poor choice on their part. Some large employers were already on the fence about dropping zoom in favor of teams, and this is just going to push them over the edge.

• by AndrewKemendo on 8/8/23, 12:19 AM

  Nope

  We’re not buying it

  The days of the “corporate responsibility” letter are over. Nothing you say will be believed if it conflicts with your bottom line.

  There’s saying in Texas…won’t be fooled again

• by Lio on 8/8/23, 11:47 AM

  What I really want to know is, can I as someone compelled to use Zoom as an employee can opt-out of Zoom training their AI on my voice, image and data?

  If my employer is the "customer" what say, if any, do I have as an individual?

  By participating in a call am I giving Zoom permission to do things like train deep fakes of me?

  This is all too Blackmirrory for my liking.

• by andreagrandi on 8/8/23, 6:08 AM

  Question (I may know the answer), if the call is end to end encrypted, how can they use users content?

• by graeme on 8/7/23, 10:25 PM

  What are the equivalent terms for Microsoft Teams?

• by karaterobot on 8/7/23, 9:56 PM

  Ahh, so they're pulling the old "You can leave the meeting if you don't like becoming part of our training data" routine, and that's what they mean by consent.

• by TheCapeGreek on 8/8/23, 7:39 AM

  To pile on the alternative recommendations: I've enjoyed using Whereby[0] in the past. I also somehow keep forgetting about them in these discussions until someone reminds me. The main thing of it for me is it's been more reliable than Jitsi (though I do need to give Jitsi another try) and doesn't need to be self-hosted.

  [0]https://whereby.com/

• by lightedman on 8/8/23, 2:04 AM

  Too late, what you publicly advertised online and what you have in the TOS are conflicting and false advertising.

  But this is par for the course for Zoom.

• by sherlock_h on 8/7/23, 5:19 PM

  Seems like they are addressing it heads-on

• by rukuu001 on 8/8/23, 2:39 AM

  > For AI, we do not use audio, video, or chat content for training our models without customer consent.

  Don't we provide consent when we agree to the TOS? And we can't use the product without doing that?

• by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 8/8/23, 8:12 AM

  Zoom is getting desperate. They have been in decline since the end of the pandemic. That's what the analysts are saying.

• by smrtinsert on 8/7/23, 9:16 PM

  Jokes on them, I'm already streaming my AI avatar.

• by tagami on 8/7/23, 9:08 PM

  Put that right in the TOS.

• by DueDilligence on 8/7/23, 7:17 PM

  .. just today, we decided to cancel our K12 contract with zoom.

  All 350+ workstations.