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

blog.zoom.us

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

#21

Post by nwoli »

dr_monster wrote: post #10
mplewis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TOS has been updated to state the following: > Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.

Apparently the TOS can be edited at any time to say anything without notice. It’s worth mentioning that per this agreement they can still do almost anything else with that data. They could put your face up on a billboard if they wanted to. I’m out. I was a paying user. Can’t run fast enough from ever doing business with them again.

Per the agreement using the service can probably be considered consent. Ie “we won’t use your data without your consent” translates to legal code “if you accept the TOS which you do if you use the app, then you’ve given consent”

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

#22

Post by TheRealPomax »

hackernewds wrote: post #9
tailspin2019 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the company’s history, it doesn’t seem very baffling at all… > Zoom has agreed to pay $85 million to settle claims that it lied about offering end-to-end encryption and gave user data to Facebook and Google without the consent of users. The settlement between Zoom and the filers of a class-action lawsuit also covers security problems [0] > Mac update nukes dangerous webserver installed by Zoom [1] > The 'S' in…

That seems an intentional business decision where expected value of fine < perceived benefit. $85M is little

$85M may be nothing to Apple, Facebook, or Google, but to Zoom it's a substantial amount. Their quarterly net income for Q1 2023 was only 15.4M.

(Even if revenue was much higher. Revenue doesn't tell you anything about how well a company can take a financial hit)

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

#23

Post by dghlsakjg »

littlestymaar wrote: post #13
mplewis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TOS has been updated to state the following: > Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.

> without your consent. †but we'll prompt you an overly long privacy policy including such consent whose acceptation is just a checkbox you tick the first time your join a call without even paying attention (nor choice)

This seems to be a pretty big thing. Zoom seems to have been adopted by a lot of government processes.

How does this apply for court hearings, council meetings, etc…

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

#24

Post by dylan604 »

littlestymaar wrote: post #11

> 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.

It's like a drug addict that only went to rehab to avoid jail and is not really wanting to stop. That next relapse is just right there waiting for them.

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

#25

Post by lolinder »

bluefishinit wrote: post #16

> 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 i…

Just out of curiosity—did you cancel the account in April when they changed the terms, or in August when people finally noticed?

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

#26

Post by bluefishinit »

lolinder wrote: post #25
bluefishinit wrote: post #16

> 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 i…

Just out of curiosity—did you cancel the account in April when they changed the terms, or in August when people finally noticed?

August, when I saw the changes. I have to admit I'm not babysitting all of our vendor's TOS so am glad these things get surfaced on HN.

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

#27

Post by gchamonlive »

berbec wrote: post #4

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, cop…

> redistribute, publish, import, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create

This is very Technologic

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

#28

Post by StevenXC »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #23
littlestymaar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without your consent. †but we'll prompt you an overly long privacy policy including such consent whose acceptation is just a checkbox you tick the first time your join a call without even paying attention (nor choice)

This seems to be a pretty big thing. Zoom seems to have been adopted by a lot of government processes. How does this apply for court hearings, council meetings, etc…

ZoomGov likely has a different ToS

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

#29

Post by btown »

pseudosavant wrote: post #15
mplewis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TOS has been updated to state the following: > Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.

"...will not use...to train ..." (emphasis mine) They'll do inference all day long, but not train without consent. Only being slightly paranoid here, but they could still analyze all of the audio for nefarious reasons (insider trading, identifying monetizable medical information from doctor's on Zoom, etc). Think of the marketing data they could generate for B2B products because they get to "listen" and "watch" every…

This is really important, and I would further emphasize the word our. Zoom doesn't need permission to "train" their own in-house artificial intelligence model when it can just transmit/sublicense that data to someone else who will train a model, or to an internal team who will use it (perhaps in few-shot prompts at scale, which is not technically training a model!) for "consulting services" in the broadest sense that that team can imagine.

I generally feel like the general slowdown of capital availability in our industry will lead/is leading to companies doing a lot more desperate things with data than they've ever done before. If a management team doesn't think they'll survive a bad couple of quarters (or that they won't hit performance cliffs that let them keep their jobs or bonuses), all of a sudden there's less weight placed on the long-term trust of customers and more on "what can we do that is permissible by our contract language, even if we lose some customers because of it." That's the moment when a slippery ethical slope comes into play for previously trustworthy companies. So any expansion of a TOS in today's age should be evaluated closely.

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

#30

Post by burkaman »

gruez wrote: post #3

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.

Yes, who could imagine such a thing from a company that leaked personal data without consent (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58050391) and lied about end-to-end encryption for 5 years (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2020/11/...).
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