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Comment by dr_monster | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Per the agreement using the service can probably be considered consent. Ie “we won’t use your data without your consent” translates to legal code “if you accept the TOS which you do if you use the app, then you’ve given consent”

That argument wouldn't fly in a court of law in the EU/UK, but many many companies try it on anyway.

Edit: they added the line back again -_-

They just made another edit and removed the line.

Here's the edit history going all the way back to March:

- 4/1 https://www.diffchecker.com/dCuVSMnp/

- 7/1 https://www.diffchecker.com/Zny4Rjqw/

- 8/7 https://www.diffchecker.com/ER0RHSdb/

- 8/8 https://www.diffchecker.com/RLiqgAaA/

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.

> 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.

This is not true. At least in the US you are required to notify customers when you change the terms of service, and as far as I know in the EU as well.

I'm well aware of the US court ruling in the early 2000s that declared the users must be notified of ToS changes. And yet, companies frequently change ToS without providing such notification in a way that customers will actually notice anyway, so it doesn't seem to matter much.

How about analyze all the meetings from company x in order to insider trade or perform some other kind of corporate sabatoge.

> or perform some other kind of corporate sabatoge.

Webex seems to be the "corporate" video conference service, when secrets are a concern, from my experience.

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

This is the question! Is there anything anyone would recommend on security grounds?

Enterprise may resonate with something with Signal level e2ee.

Has anyone tried Element IO, as an example, in a commercial setting?

Asking for a friend.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37021910

jitsi

https://meet.jit.si/

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.

Doesn’t using a Google product taint the solution, if privacy is a major concern? Also, WebRTC leaks ip addresses when using a VPN.

What is the secure way to video conference? Webex? FaceTime offers end to end encryption, but can not easily share non-mac os screens.

Articles like this sure make me like Apple sometimes

https://9to5mac.com/2023/07/20/apple-imessage-facetime-remov...

Yeah, though I don't really understand your privacy/security model. If you are worried about being targeted directly by Google or some three letter agency, you certainly should not use any of this technology. Instead, you need to go back to the basics, to something running on a physically segregated network, with a much smaller attack surface area. If you are just worried about being dragnet tracked, you are way better off with Jitsi than Zoom even if you end up using Chromium to connect to the session.

Jitsi but using Chrome doesn't fix anything privacy-wise.

Well for me it does, at least to some extent, as I use Chromium built by Arch Linux and run a new clean profile for each call. I highly doubt Google is collecting my actual data (not metadata), like AV streams or even web history, in this configuration.

Most "free markets" in the US -- certainly all that matter -- are dominated by 2 or 3 players, and when they all agree to do the same sorts of anti-consumer things, there's nowhere to go. Even if Teams or some other small player has better ToS now, who's to say they won't do the same thing tomorrow? Or do it anyway, without telling anyone?

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