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Comment by apocalyptic0n3 | Hacker News Reader

I understand that people are (rightfully) upset by these terms. This is the first post I've seen saying they're rejecting Zoom calls, but I've seen plenty of comments on HN over the last few days on this topic saying roughly the same.

My question is: what are you doing for work where you can just decline any invitation that comes from a specific service? That's not realistic at all for most people. Is there a solution for those people?

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"Hi, sorry, our corporate security and legal review prohibits us from using the Zoom platform. Can we switch to Y platform for this call instead?"

We get this all the time with our customers. We often lead our calls with an invite to use Zoom, and many of our customers will respond that their IT department requires them to setup any conference calls or video calls using their internal system.

If this gets big, most companies won't like the idea of their internal company calls being used to train AI, and they will switch off ASAP.

Despite the language, I have a very hard time believing that Zoom is actually trying to train a generative AI on private video calls. If I had to guess this is there so that they can train adjacent services such as malware scanners for shared files or possibly their captioning service using small snippets of audio.

I'd still prefer it if they had far tighter language and clarity on how they use user data, but the tech crowd feels like it's off in conspiracy land.

If there is any actual evidence that they are using large amounts of private call data to train a generative AI then I'd really like to see that.

It's a strange mixture, and it's anticipating future needs as well as current things like malware scanning. Probably Zoom and all the other mainstream meeting services will have to use AIs on audio and video streams in due course, in an arms race against other AIs being used to generate audio and video spam, fake job interview candidates, scam calls from people that look and sound like your own family, and such things. On the other hand, who wants their daily standups scrutinised by facial sentiment analysis and posted to monthly management reports, which is the sort of thing it seems Microsoft might do.

I don't think Zoom is at fault for wanting or needing to use AIs or plan to, on the streams. They might even be ahead of the game. But their communication about it is rather weasely at the moment, and their COO and CISO comments on here don't help with that.

As always, I'd take what people are saying with a grain of salt. It might not be work related calls they're declining either.

a conference call

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