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Zoom has finally defined that it won’t use any customer call content – at all – for anything.
Zoom has updated its terms of service to say that it will no longer use any customer content to train its generative AI systems.
According to Variety, the update, which the software company announced on Friday, comes after observers raised the alarm about a recent change in Zoom’s Terms of Service that seemed to grant the entity royalty-free rights in perpetuity for customer video calls and presentations for the purposes of training AI models.
In its initial response on August 7, Zoom said it doesn’t use any customer audio, video or chat content for training AI “without consent.”
A statement followed on August 11 to state it will not use such content in any way related to generative AI development. The blog post on the Zoom website regarding this has now since been updated.
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A lawyer showed up to virtual court in the 394th district of Texas with a kitten filter turned on.
“Following feedback received regarding Zoom’s recently updated terms of service, particularly related to our new generative artificial intelligence features, Zoom has updated our terms of service and the below blog post to make it clear that Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments or other communications like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or third-party artificial intelligence models.”
Zoom said in-product notices have also been updated to reflect these changes.
According to Zoom’s updated terms of service, the company still owns all rights to what it calls “service-generated data.” This consists of telemetry data, product-usage data, diagnostic data and similar data “that Zoom collects or generates in connection with your or your End Users’ use of the Services or Software.”
Yes you’re reading in between the lines correctly – that would mean that your private conversations have not been as private as you thought. They’ve been analysed by AI, for a perhaps indeterminate amount of time.
Whether customer call content has been utilised in the development of their two new generative AI features, is anyone’s guess.
Two generative AI features have recently been released by the company, Zoom IQ Meeting Summary and Zoom IQ Team Chat Compose, both offer automated meeting summaries and “AI-powered chat composition.”
These use of these features is on an opt-in rather than mandatory basis, and can be controlled via your administrator’s control panel under your Zoom account.
Unfortunately, in 2023, private is more of a creative adjective than anything else when applied to mainstream tech.
Though no doubt surprising to everyday people, the apparent lack of regard for individual user privacy in cases like this is unlikely to surprise the tech-savvy.
Even without Zoom’s customers’ content being utilised internally for AI training purposes or otherwise, communications via centralised providers such as these, are irrefutably un-private by their very design.
The centralised data architectures that Zoom and other such ‘Web2’ communications platforms like WhatsApp are built on means that user data collects in a central server like a honeypot, creating a treasure trove that’s ripe for reuse by the company itself, for resale and monetisation (Hello Meta) or as an attractive target for theft by hackers.
Though applications such as Zoom may have privacy-focused features, such as password-secure access to meetings and end-to-end (E2E) encryption for call content, all centralised communications platforms, that is to say, all mainstream communication platforms, have the same faults interwoven through to their core.
If you’re looking for trustless, certifiable privacy, irrespective of the terms of service, Zoom probably isn’t the place to go to get it. Looking outside the realms of big tech to decentralised providers like Signal, an independent non-profit and favourite with international journalists and whistle-blowers, is probably your best bet.
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