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Earlier quoted context omitted.
The AI part isn't the bad part. It's the "use for marketing", like gMail. One implication is that lawyers can no longer use Zoom for anything which is attorney-client privileged.
How does this add up with E2EE? They claim they can’t read anything passing through the server. Is there some other way they’ll get access? https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360048660871-End-t... .
> 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…
I guess you'll have a hard time trying to find a service, video calls and else, that doesn't have terms similar to these.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-imp…
I stand corrected. I suppose reading the contract instead of snarking might have allowed me to avoid the embarrassment. Thank you.
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…
1) Until recently, Zoom's video/audio quality knocked everyone else's into a cocked hat. I don't think that's the case, anymore. Looks like a lot of folks got off their butts, and improved their quality, but I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, by anyone.
2) Everyone else is using it.
#2 is a biggie. Monopoly inertia is pretty hard to overcome, for people not in the tech industry (we'll change on a whim).
Zoom is not easy to use. Its settings are a mess, but everyone is used to dealing with the Zoom pain, and don't want to switch.
We can be remarkably cavalier in dismissing non-tech folks, but I learned to stop doing that, many years ago. We're not the only smart people in the world.
People (in general) don't like getting sidetracked by their tools. They want to get a job done, and how they get it done is not irrelevant, but not that important to them. They develop and refine a workflow, which is usually heavily informed by their choice of tools, and that "wears a groove." They don't want to switch grooves; even if they are not enjoying their tool.
Most tech folks, on the other hand love tools. I had an employee that would stop his main project, and design a massive subsystem, just to make a simple command-line process a few seconds shorter. I had to keep on my toes. He was the best engineer I've ever worked with, but it was a chore to keep him focused.
Non-tech types are seldom like that, and we can sometimes miss it.
These are the folks that use our products, and we don't actually gain anything by disrespecting them, even when they really piss us off.
TL;DR: Want people to stop using Zoom? Produce something better, and make it something that non-tech folks will love.
That means easy to use, forget-about-it UX, and extremely high quality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
I guess it makes sense. Companies are people, after all
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…
Users vote with their feet based on cost and UX. While intertia is certainly a thing, there's a reason Zoom got a foothold while others didn't. The ability to send out links and having people join the meeting without creating accounts or manually installing clients first is huge in most real-world scenarios. Could you do that with... Teams? Skype? Hangouts if they weren't gmail users? Do those people know anyone with the knowledge and gumption to host something?
From the beginning of my involvement in FOSS like 25 years ago, developers have griped about non-technical users being intimidated, or even just really annoyed by UX resistance that we consider trivial. That's the primary reasons open source alternatives are alternatives rather than the standard in user-facing software.
Zoom's lawyers are trying to pull a fast one with these revised Terms. The new sentence on user consent being required to train AIs applies only to "Customer Content," not "Service Generated Data." In sec. 10.4, Zoom says "... Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent." Customer Content is defined in 10.1 and is broadly worded. But the fir…
This might be a loophole Zoom is trying to use - while they technically not using customer data (Zoom client not sending video stream to train AI), but zoom client can process data locally and send only embeddings (numeric vectors without ties to customer PII data) and it still will be customer data
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…
> [...] for the purpose of product and service development, marketing, analytics, quality assurance, machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing, improvement of the Services, Software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software, or any combination thereof [...]
Those two clauses, coupled with the current murky state of AI-from-copyrighted-material, should make everyone run screaming from Zoom as a product that can be entrusted with confidential information.
Nextcloud Talk has no TOS AFAIK. It is FOSS and self-hosted. Nextcloud AI tools run on your instance with the exception of the optional OpenAI plugin app. They are developing further FOSS AI models to replace those. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14gSiyAl9Fw