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Comment by aparnabzoom | Hacker News Reader

Hi there - this is Aparna from Zoom, our Chief Operating Officer. Thank you for your care and concern for our customers - we are grateful for the opportunity to double click on how we treat customer content.

To clarify, Zoom customers decide whether to enable generative AI features (recently launched on a free trial basis) and separately whether to share customer content with Zoom for product improvement purposes.

Also, Zoom participants receive an in-meeting notice or a Chat Compose pop-up when these features are enabled through our UI, and they will definitely know their data may be used for product improvement purposes.

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Answer unsatisfactory. With the recent T&C update, Zoom committed (business) suicide. A memorable fail story to avoid. Goodbye forever, Zoom.

Thanks for commenting. The issue is not with using AI features though - it is with the Terms granting you unrestricted and eternal use to our conversations to train your AI and potentially disclose our work to your other customers.

Well said. Zoom thinks we are not talking about the terms of service as it pertains to a particular feature and not their entire rights moving forward.

I can’t help but notice the distinction between between customers _deciding_ and participants being _informed_. Can participants not also decide? Can the decisions not be mutual and decided per-session?

My child uses zoom for school and our family for healthcare - both of those scenarios make us participants. It sounds like we are beholden to the decisions of your customer, the institutions.

I am extremely concerned and intending to initiate discussions and suggesting alternatives promptly this week.

The blog post your company just published confirms this:

Account owners or administrators (“customers”) provide consent. Participants receive notice.

Gross and disappointing.

That's not how consent works in the GDPR legal sense. (But maybe that's not something Zoom USA cares about if an insignificant amount of profit comes from EU.)

Remember when Zoom lied about having strong encryption, and sharing data without permission? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/zoom-to-pay-85m-...

Thanks for your response, but as you can see in the comments even HN users are confused about this.

Where can we find the ability to 'switch off' any sort of generative AI features or data harvesting?

I ask because the zoom administrative interface is an absolute nightmare that feels more like a bunch of darkpatterns than usable UX. When I asked your customer support team – on this occasion and others – they clearly don't even read the request, let alone provide a sufficient response. I've been going back-and-forth on a related issue with your CSRs for almost two months; they've neither escalated nor solved my problem.

The bottom line is that as a paying customer, you're incentivizing me and others to move to different services – namely because you seem to be entangled by your own bureaucracy and lack of values than any outside problem.

When you say “Zoom customers decide … whether to share customer content with Zoom”…

Can you elaborate on whether this is opt-out or opt-in? Does a new user who starts to use Zoom today have this turned on by default?

Usually when companies say things like “customers decide” it can gloss over a lot of detail like hidden settings that default to “on” or other potentially misleading / dark patterns.

Given the obvious interest in the finite details being discussed in this thread, and your legal background, it would be good to hear a bit more of a comprehensive response if you can provide it.

Hi there - this is opt in. A new user starting to use Zoom today does not have this turned on by default.

Thanks for participating in the discussion here, it’s helpful.

Clause 10.4 in your terms seems to grant you rights to do pretty much anything with “Customer Content” (including the AI training specifically being talked about).

So I’m still a bit confused because regardless of any opt in mechanism in your product, these usage terms don’t seem to be predicated on the user having done anything to opt in other than ostensibly agreeing to your terms of service?

In other words, as a Zoom user who has deliberately NOT opted in to anything, I still don’t have a lot of confidence in the rights being granted to you via your standard terms over my content.

The wording of the terms imply that you don’t actually need me to opt in for you to have these rights over my data?

Thanks for your question - we have clarified our position in this blog. We do not use video, audio and chat content to train our AI models without customer consent. Please read more here https://blog.zoom.us/zooms-term-service-ai/

Because I use Linux, I can't make any local changes until I log into a meeting. For example, I can only change my display name after joining a meeting.

Ignoring the laughable lack of Linux support for a moment... will I need to log into a meeting so that I can open up my settings to opt out of this? If so, this is an unacceptable situation as I need to watch criminal court hearings and do not want to risk violating state law that bans the recording of criminal hearings.

It's great that you are engaging and writing about this, many thanks.

While your blog is interesting, it doesn't change the impact of the Terms of Service as currently written. They seem to give you the freedom to train your current and future AI/ML capabilities using any Customer Content (10.4), and your terms apparently have your users warrant that doing so will not infringe any rights (10.6).

Perhaps your terms of use should reflect your current practices rather than leaving scope for those practices to vary without users realising? Will you be changing them following all this feedback?

Following up on this point, we’ve updated our terms of service (in section 10.4) to further confirm that we will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.

You can see that now clearly stated in our blog: https://blog.zoom.us/zooms-term-service-ai/

Can there be some easy to file screen shots on how to disable it for anyone who is not a new user?

Your COO’s wording is that a new user will have to opt in. It seems the major still might have to know where to opt out.

This addresses concerns about Zoom Video Communications, Inc. itself using e.g. recordings for purposes of training their own AI models. It does not address the potentially much greater risks arising from the company potentially selling access to the collection of zoom recordings to other companies for purposes of training AI models of such other companies. Here’s a somewhat-in-depth analysis: https://zoomai.info/

Thanks for following up, Michael, it is much appreciated. It does leave me (and judging my adjacent comments, also others) with questions, including:

* That wording seems very specific - is there a reason you did not just say "we will not use Customer Input or Customer Content to train our AI" given you have defined those terms? Are you leaving scope for something else (such as uploaded files or presentation content) to still be used? * Can you also clarify exactly which (and whose) "consent" is applicable here? In meetings between multiple equal parties there may not be any one party with standing to consent for everyone involved. Your blog post seems to assume there can be, but the ToS don't appear to define "consent".

Do you have a public, published trustworthy AI framework that you use to guide your AI projects? Something like https://www.cognilytica.com/trustworthy-ai-workshop/ ? Would be good to see what decisions and processes you follow to guide your AI efforts, how you work with suppliers and partners, consent and disclosure policies, and how you communicate internally and externally.

Hello

Thanks for commenting directly.

As we know, ‘do not’ does not mean will not in the future.

Also can screenshots be added clearly outlining all the settings that will opt out and remain opt it?

As you might know, Zoom sometimes auto opts in on new or updated features.

As a voice actor whose sole income is my voice, ANYONE claiming the right to my voice for training AI and speech modeling is 100% unauthorized and unacceptable under any circumstance.

One of the major faults of Zoom possibly from the rate of change in it is how many features are buried in the web configuration that are not in the physical application.

Seamless integration and access between the two is not where it should be.

I certainly do not want my private chats, meetings, nor any non-public company information shared with anyone else. This seems like a massive privacy breach. Where is the opt-out to disable this?

No settings in the iOS app. They do share things with third parties.

Feel free to read through the pages of recently updated policies. I wonder what data is “retained” and where “overseas” among other concerns they state.

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