Hi there, this is Aparna, COO of Zoom. We’ve updated our terms of service (in section 10.4) to further confirm that we will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent. Please take a look. https://blog.zoom.us/zooms-term-service-ai/
Hi there, I'm the COO of Zoom. We currently do not use audio, video or chat content to train AI models and we would not do so without customer consent. Please see our blog https://blog.zoom.us/zooms-term-service-ai/
> We do not use audio, video or chat content to train AI models
<Edit: the word “currently” was edited in to the parent comment after I originally quoted it>
What your linked article says:
> When you choose to enable Zoom IQ … you will also be presented with a transparent consent process for training our AI models using your customer content.
Consent or not, these two statements seem to be at odds with each other?
There isn’t room for such ambiguity in this discussion. Details really matter here.
This community has a long memory about previous Zoom security issues and misleading statements (eg about encryption) - so it’s worth understanding that the level of scrutiny being given to this latest topic is likely elevated as a result. (In other words, I think Zoom has some extra work to do to rebuild trust among many of us here).
Hi there, I don't believe you, especially since you've misrepresented that blog post. It actually says: "we do not use audio, video, or chat content for training our models without customer consent." It explicitly says that you do use customer content to train your models.
From the screenshot: "You are directing Zoom to access, process, and use your participants' inputs and AI-generated content for the purpose of Zoom IQ product improvement, including model training."
Are you claiming that agreeing to these terms of service doesn't count as consent? I think your lawyers would disagree.
As the others have been saying, you need to absolutely spell this out in the ToS. The language in the ToS is far too broad and no matter how trustworthy your company may be now, people are cluing into the fact that that trustworthiness is one heartbeat away from a change in leadership that decides to push the boundary up to the legal limits in the law or ToS.
They explicitly said “we do not”, not “we will not.” The ToS and their statements allow them to change their mind at any time without notifying anyone.
We’ve updated our terms of service (in section 10.4) to further confirm that we will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent. https://blog.zoom.us/zooms-term-service-ai/
I do not think that blog posts have any legal value whatsoever. The current terms of service are too risky for most companies who would otherwise have loved to continue to be users of your product.
I still remember when they promised E2E encryption when they had at least a MITM on their end. They have since deleted their (whole!) blog where the whole bullshit non-apology was posted. Zoom’s comments or promises are completely worthless.
“Customer consent” as in, accepting the TOS by continuing to use the product? Have some respect for the intelligence of your users. If you’re playing dirty lawyerball in HN comments you can’t be trusted to act in good faith.
Say more things. Are you suggesting that by “customer consent”, they mean the consent of someone other than those of us paying for zoom? That makes no sense, and is not supported by the use of “customer” in their TOS.
No. I'm saying "you" are the person in the Zoom call and who agreed to the Terms of Service when you installed the software, but the "customer" is the Zoom account owner, and these are usually not the same person.
Most people in Zoom calls at any moment are in calls where they are not the customer for that call. I would guess most Zoom users have never been customers in that sense, as in they never initiate calls and may not have an account.
Sure, and I think all-party consent should be required if a call has any guests. My point was much shallower—just that OP/Zoom is using language that suggests “customer consent” is some separate thing they would ask for, when in fact using the software (accepting the TOS) is that consent.
Thank you for your feedback. We’ve updated our terms of service (in section 10.4) to further confirm that we will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent. https://blog.zoom.us/zooms-term-service-ai/
It's especially annoying because I can count on both hands situations where the blogging / social media team and the engineering / legal teams weren't on the same page. The blogging team sends out a message saying "we don't," while engineering is already working on something that does and legal has signed off because it doesn't violate the Terms.
She's lying, if you click on the blog post you can see that if an account owner opts in, they use audio, video, and chat content of all participants to train their models. As a user you are notified of this but not given a way to opt out, other than just leaving the meeting.
Based on feedback, we’ve updated our terms of service (in section 10.4) to further confirm that we will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.https://blog.zoom.us/zooms-term-service-ai/
That's nice, but your comment still says "We currently do not use audio, video or chat content to train AI models". You do, currently. If you don't think there's anything wrong with that, why come here to lie about it?
"without your consent" is also very misleading - you get the account owner's consent, but if I join another company's Zoom meeting and they have this turned on, I am not meaningfully asked for consent. I am informed, but the only way to "opt out" is to leave the meeting immediately (but you already have my face?) and uninstall Zoom. This is obvious coercion, Zoom has majority market share and most people do not have the freedom to decline when somebody sends them a meeting link.
"We don't use your data to train AI models"
(but we can pass it to another entity to do so)
"we would not do so without customer consent"
(...and everyone who uses our service has consented to anything we want them to in our convoluted ToS.
What you should have said is: "Zoom doesn't use audio, video or chat content to do anything but transmit it to the parties that are logged in to the meeting."
I frequently have to use Zoom for communications that are privileged by law. I wonder when the class action will happen?
Based on feedback from you all, we’ve updated our terms of service (in section 10.4) to further confirm that we will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent. https://blog.zoom.us/zooms-term-service-ai/
There's definitely more that can be done in terms of setting trust with your users, partners, employers, and suppliers - I posted a comment elsewhere on whether or not you have a posted and shared Trustworthy AI policy, and something that is used to guide internal AI development. Happy to email that to you as well.
Even if you don't, the language of the agreement allows you to. The very same clause contains the consent language, so now that you have the materials, you can start making fake versions of us at your leisure.
Hi COO, of zoom, when people leave or join our zoom meetings the CHIME does not work when the host has left audio. this makes our business really hard to operate. as we rely on your awesome product. HALP
Hi there - this is Aparna from Zoom, our Chief Operating Officer. Thank you for your care and concern for our customers - we are grateful for the opportunity to double click on how we treat customer content.
To clarify, Zoom customers decide whether to enable generative AI features (recently launched on a free trial basis) and separately whether to share customer content with Zoom for product improvement purposes.
Also, Zoom participants receive an in-meeting notice or a Chat Compose pop-up when these features are enabled through our UI, and they will definitely know their data may be used for product improvement purposes.
Thanks for commenting. The issue is not with using AI features though - it is with the Terms granting you unrestricted and eternal use to our conversations to train your AI and potentially disclose our work to your other customers.
Well said. Zoom thinks we are not talking about the terms of service as it pertains to a particular feature and not their entire rights moving forward.
I can’t help but notice the distinction between between customers _deciding_ and participants being _informed_. Can participants not also decide? Can the decisions not be mutual and decided per-session?
My child uses zoom for school and our family for healthcare - both of those scenarios make us participants. It sounds like we are beholden to the decisions of your customer, the institutions.
I am extremely concerned and intending to initiate discussions and suggesting alternatives promptly this week.
That's not how consent works in the GDPR legal sense. (But maybe that's not something Zoom USA cares about if an insignificant amount of profit comes from EU.)
Thanks for your response, but as you can see in the comments even HN users are confused about this.
Where can we find the ability to 'switch off' any sort of generative AI features or data harvesting?
I ask because the zoom administrative interface is an absolute nightmare that feels more like a bunch of darkpatterns than usable UX. When I asked your customer support team – on this occasion and others – they clearly don't even read the request, let alone provide a sufficient response. I've been going back-and-forth on a related issue with your CSRs for almost two months; they've neither escalated nor solved my problem.
The bottom line is that as a paying customer, you're incentivizing me and others to move to different services – namely because you seem to be entangled by your own bureaucracy and lack of values than any outside problem.
When you say “Zoom customers decide … whether to share customer content with Zoom”…
Can you elaborate on whether this is opt-out or opt-in? Does a new user who starts to use Zoom today have this turned on by default?
Usually when companies say things like “customers decide” it can gloss over a lot of detail like hidden settings that default to “on” or other potentially misleading / dark patterns.
Given the obvious interest in the finite details being discussed in this thread, and your legal background, it would be good to hear a bit more of a comprehensive response if you can provide it.
Thanks for participating in the discussion here, it’s helpful.
Clause 10.4 in your terms seems to grant you rights to do pretty much anything with “Customer Content” (including the AI training specifically being talked about).
So I’m still a bit confused because regardless of any opt in mechanism in your product, these usage terms don’t seem to be predicated on the user having done anything to opt in other than ostensibly agreeing to your terms of service?
In other words, as a Zoom user who has deliberately NOT opted in to anything, I still don’t have a lot of confidence in the rights being granted to you via your standard terms over my content.
The wording of the terms imply that you don’t actually need me to opt in for you to have these rights over my data?
Thanks for your question - we have clarified our position in this blog. We do not use video, audio and chat content to train our AI models without customer consent. Please read more here https://blog.zoom.us/zooms-term-service-ai/
It's great that you are engaging and writing about this, many thanks.
While your blog is interesting, it doesn't change the impact of the Terms of Service as currently written. They seem to give you the freedom to train your current and future AI/ML capabilities using any Customer Content (10.4), and your terms apparently have your users warrant that doing so will not infringe any rights (10.6).
Perhaps your terms of use should reflect your current practices rather than leaving scope for those practices to vary without users realising? Will you be changing them following all this feedback?
Following up on this point, we’ve updated our terms of service (in section 10.4) to further confirm that we will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.
This addresses concerns about Zoom Video Communications, Inc. itself using e.g. recordings for purposes of training their own AI models. It does not address the potentially much greater risks arising from the company potentially selling access to the collection of zoom recordings to other companies for purposes of training AI models of such other companies. Here’s a somewhat-in-depth analysis: https://zoomai.info/
Thanks for following up, Michael, it is much appreciated. It does leave me (and judging my adjacent comments, also others) with questions, including:
* That wording seems very specific - is there a reason you did not just say "we will not use Customer Input or Customer Content to train our AI" given you have defined those terms? Are you leaving scope for something else (such as uploaded files or presentation content) to still be used?
* Can you also clarify exactly which (and whose) "consent" is applicable here? In meetings between multiple equal parties there may not be any one party with standing to consent for everyone involved. Your blog post seems to assume there can be, but the ToS don't appear to define "consent".
Do you have a public, published trustworthy AI framework that you use to guide your AI projects? Something like https://www.cognilytica.com/trustworthy-ai-workshop/ ? Would be good to see what decisions and processes you follow to guide your AI efforts, how you work with suppliers and partners, consent and disclosure policies, and how you communicate internally and externally.
Because I use Linux, I can't make any local changes until I log into a meeting. For example, I can only change my display name after joining a meeting.
Ignoring the laughable lack of Linux support for a moment... will I need to log into a meeting so that I can open up my settings to opt out of this? If so, this is an unacceptable situation as I need to watch criminal court hearings and do not want to risk violating state law that bans the recording of criminal hearings.
As a voice actor whose sole income is my voice, ANYONE claiming the right to my voice for training AI and speech modeling is 100% unauthorized and unacceptable under any circumstance.
One of the major faults of Zoom possibly from the rate of change in it is how many features are buried in the web configuration that are not in the physical application.
Seamless integration and access between the two is not where it should be.
I certainly do not want my private chats, meetings, nor any non-public company information shared with anyone else. This seems like a massive privacy breach. Where is the opt-out to disable this?
No settings in the iOS app. They do share things with third parties.
Feel free to read through the pages of recently updated policies. I wonder what data is “retained” and where “overseas” among other concerns they state.
