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Not Using Zoom

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Re: Not Using Zoom

#121
post #95
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loathe Zoom but wouldn’t that be the right call? The person who made the infringing content is responsible? We’ve already been through all of this with social networks, no?

It’s not the same though. When you post on social media, you’re posting information publicly (or semi-publicly). When you say, or show, something on a zoom call, there’s an expectation of privacy between the participants of the call. Zoom is now saying no, there isn’t, because they’re going to use the content of your calls to train their AI.

there's a comma between "artificial intelligence" and "training" so I could read that as permission to use your data in any sort of training (e.g. training customer support staff) though I guess it doesn't rule out using it to train an artificial intelligence.

Re: Not Using Zoom

#122

I understand that people are (rightfully) upset by these terms. This is the first post I've seen saying they're rejecting Zoom calls, but I've seen plenty of comments on HN over the last few days on this topic saying roughly the same. My question is: what are you doing for work where you can just decline any invitation that comes from a specific service? That's not realistic at all for most people. Is there a solutio…

"Hi, sorry, our corporate security and legal review prohibits us from using the Zoom platform. Can we switch to Y platform for this call instead?"

Re: Not Using Zoom

#123
post #96

I see 4 competitors in this space (consumer video-conferencing SaaS): - Zoom - Google Meet - MS Teams - Jitsi (free) I try and avoid Google products where I can but it seems like the least worst option here (I use Jitsi when I can but it's limited). Is there a 5th option out there? I have tried Discord, it's reasonable, but the UX is kinda crazy for anyone not used to it - very hard to convince non-gamers to use it.

In what way do you find Jitsi limited? Perhaps BigBlueButton would be another reasonable option?

Jitsi is limited in that any organization big enough to have an IT security policy almost certainly prohibits standing up your own online meeting service for business use. You'll have to use the company-approved service, which is most likely Zoom or maybe Teams or Google. I haven't looked but I'd bet that Microsoft's and Google's terms of use are broadly similar to Zoom's for similar services.

Re: Not Using Zoom

#124

I see 4 competitors in this space (consumer video-conferencing SaaS): - Zoom - Google Meet - MS Teams - Jitsi (free) I try and avoid Google products where I can but it seems like the least worst option here (I use Jitsi when I can but it's limited). Is there a 5th option out there? I have tried Discord, it's reasonable, but the UX is kinda crazy for anyone not used to it - very hard to convince non-gamers to use it.

There's also slack huddles, however I suppose this really only works for internal company calls. Apart from that I've found that to be the best option, especially when using slack already.

Re: Not Using Zoom

#125
post #22
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If no one answers I'll ask internally (I'm in Microsoft but just an engineer and not in teams), I can tell you that in our org we don't have access to customer data, actual customer data is encrypted anyway and every access to a production machine is recorded, audited and has to be justified legally (and is very rare to the point I haven't _actually_ seen it done except to literally learn how to go through the proces…

I get it from Zoom's perspective: it's a core differentiator and strategic future advantage for them. I think it's going to lose them more customers than make them money... but we'll see. MS is a more interesting case, because they have a tradition of understanding enterprise concerns, and don't really need the data from Teams given their product portfolio. But, common strategic sense often doesn't stop tactical, myo…

> I think it's going to lose them more customers than make them money... but we'll see.

We will indeed. Given the vast, vast majority of users' reading of TOS in the first place, much less understanding them, this to me seems very unlikely.

Re: Not Using Zoom

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Meet started auto-adding links to meetings You can disable that default company wide and force people to manually add it if desired.

The problem is a fair number don't do this. It's super annoying - why not do an opt-in or even a prompted opt-in to keep this to folks actually using meet maybe based on actual meet usage?

Oh sure, I don't intend to defend the default of enabling it, just trying to suggest a mitigation that might at least help internally within a single company.

Re: Not Using Zoom

#127
post #122

I understand that people are (rightfully) upset by these terms. This is the first post I've seen saying they're rejecting Zoom calls, but I've seen plenty of comments on HN over the last few days on this topic saying roughly the same. My question is: what are you doing for work where you can just decline any invitation that comes from a specific service? That's not realistic at all for most people. Is there a solutio…

"Hi, sorry, our corporate security and legal review prohibits us from using the Zoom platform. Can we switch to Y platform for this call instead?"

We get this all the time with our customers. We often lead our calls with an invite to use Zoom, and many of our customers will respond that their IT department requires them to setup any conference calls or video calls using their internal system.

Re: Not Using Zoom

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jitsi's free SaaS is a great resource to have available but it's not really viable for many many (most?) use-cases. Apart from general stability issues (which is in fairness are always improving) the biggest blocker is the "Video turned off to save bandwidth" message that you will inevitably receive on any call with more than 2 members. This doesn't seem in my experience to just be something that occurs occasionally…

Yes, you can change the maxFullResolutionParticipants setting in config.js to fix this.

Will you walk my mom through that?

Re: Not Using Zoom

#129
This is Michael Adams, Zoom’s CISO. I want to reiterate our thanks for your feedback and emphasize our continuing commitment to protecting our customers’ data as we make exciting improvements to Zoom products.

At Zoom, we do not use customer audio, video, and chat to train our generative AI models without customer consent.

You can learn more about enabling generative AI features, consent, and notice here: https://blog.zoom.us/zooms-term-service-ai/

Re: Not Using Zoom

#130
post #114
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> arising out of or related to > your or your End User’s infringement or violation of any Proprietary Rights or other right of any person or entity

If you're authorized to access the data, it's not infringement. Again, this is if you're using zoom to stream Disney movies or whatever, and Disney decides to sue you and zoom. If you're screensharing confidential company documents you're authorized to view, this will certainly not apply to you. If for whatever reason your company is getting you to screenshare third party documents that you're not authorized to view…

You may be authorized, but you may not be authorized to confer or transfer those rights to a third party (e.g. Zoom).
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