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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

#51

Post by autoexec »

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.

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

#52

Post by reilly3000 »

Imnimo wrote: post #43
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…

Yeah, if the TOS says one thing, and a blogpost pinky-promises another, only one of those two actually counts as far as I'm concerned.

I wonder if a deceptive marketing post explaining a privacy policy change could be considered material if there was a lawsuit.

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

#53

Post by lolinder »

singleshot_ wrote: post #50
lolinder wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can use "will" to create a promise--a contractual obligation. See Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage 941-942 (2d ed., Oxford U. Press 1995). When used in this way, "will" is not merely stating a future event, it is creating a promise to perform: > > Landlord will clean and maintain all common areas. > In most basic contracts, I recommend using "will" to create obligations, as long as you are ca…

So, I get that you’re downvoting and contradicting, but are you sure we don’t agree? Let’s put it this way: I was observing precisely what you copied and pasted: this is a perfectly valid way to write a contract if you subsequently want to be able to argue either side. Was zoom careful to be sure any usage can’t be read as merely describing future events? Will ambiguity exist until this agreement is tested ?

Given that they use "Zoom will" 21 times in the document to clearly refer to their obligations—including 4 times in the paragraph entitled "10.5 Our Obligations Over Your Customer Content"—I seriously doubt they're counting on or will get points for any ambiguity.

Meanwhile not once do they use "Zoom shall". It's pretty clearly just a stylistic choice and not anything sneaky.

Edit: They even use "will" in the all-important phrase "you will pay Zoom". Surely you don't think they meant to be sneaky in that usage, and that is merely meant as a prediction of future events?

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

#54

Post by aftbit »

gnfargbl wrote: post #18
dr_monster wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which provider will you be moving to, and have you checked that their ToS are more acceptable?

If you don't need the "advanced" zoom features, I can highly recommend Jitsi. Free public service and you can self-host if you need it. We have been running a fully remote company with 90% of meetings via Jitsi since COVID with great success. I recommend Chrome over Firefox though, as FF's WebRTC support is behind Google's.

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

#55

Post by hypeit »

ec109685 wrote: post #19
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.

Always wise to remember Hanlon's razor: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" Occam's razor also applies here.

Let's please not pretend like philosophical razors are anything other than rhetorical devices. There's exactly zero data to back any of them up and it wouldn't matter if there was since each case is unique.

There is however research (that aligns with a lot of people's experience) to suggest psychopaths and sociopaths are very over represented in leadership:

https://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/babiak2010.pdf

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

#56

Post by fragmede »

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.

Unfortunately it's like Gmail. Even if I'm not using them, enough other places do that it's not feasible to totally avoid them without adding complications to my life. Those complications might be worth it to you, but eg my therapist's office uses Zoom for the backend of their app. You'd never know it unless you're the kind of person to dig into that.

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

#57

Post by ec109685 »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #39
ec109685 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always wise to remember Hanlon's razor: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" Occam's razor also applies here.

I'm sorry, I didn't maliciously stab the guy, I was just really, really, really incompetent with handling this axe.

It doesn't apply in all situations, clearly.

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

#59

Post by callalex »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #48
btown wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

> 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) Agreed, and these kinds of short-term incentives are one of the problems with American companies. On the flip side... Japanese companies think about products in decades -- the product line has to make money 10 years from now. Some old European brands think…

Got any data to back this up or are you just spouting racist tropes?
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