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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

#41

Post by dylan604 »

littlestymaar wrote: post #32
dylan604 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except the drug addict has an actual excuse for getting back to it: addiction is a medical condition, whereas here it's just lack of any kind of decency.

I’m honestly surprised there’s not a medically recognized condition for being someone that operates like this company (and others) of having no moral fiber and is only about making the dollars now with shady tactics.

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

#42

Post by freedude »

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?

jitsi

https://meet.jit.si/

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

#43

Post by Imnimo »

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.

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

#44

Post by JohnFen »

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.

> Apparently the TOS can be edited at any time to say anything without notice.

Yes, as with most terms of service. It's one of the things that makes terms of service statements unreliable.

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

#46

Post by Animats »

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.

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.

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

#47

Post by JohnFen »

dylan604 wrote: post #41
littlestymaar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the drug addict has an actual excuse for getting back to it: addiction is a medical condition, whereas here it's just lack of any kind of decency.

I’m honestly surprised there’s not a medically recognized condition for being someone that operates like this company (and others) of having no moral fiber and is only about making the dollars now with shady tactics.

I think it's called sociopathy.

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

#48

Post by bonestamp2 »

btown wrote: post #29
pseudosavant wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...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 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 about their brand in centuries -- this product made today has to be made with a process and materials that will make people in 100 years think that we made our products at the highest quality that was available to us at the time.

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

#49

Post by JohnFen »

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.

I think Hanlon's razor isn't true often enough to consider it a valid rule of thumb.

But, really, does it matter whether the bad thing is caused by incompetence or malice outside of a court of law? The bad thing happens either way.

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

#50

Post by singleshot_ »

lolinder wrote: post #36
singleshot_ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very powerful example of the difference between the words “will” and “shall.” Hats off to zoom for the free contract drafting lesson! [edit: thanks to HN commenter lolinder for the actual lesson].

> 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 ?

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