Can Zoom use audio, video from calls to train its AI?

What was the change in Zoom’s policy that raised privacy fears?

In March, the company updated its terms of service which said that by using the service, a user was granting it perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable licence and all other rights to process customer content for “product and service development, marketing, analytics, quality assurance, machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing …”

What this essentially meant is that Zoom, under these terms of service, would be able to use any content from Zoom calls, including audio and video, for its own purposes, specifically to train its AI.

For privacy advocates, this was a cause of concern. As US Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill) put it in her statement: “This [Z00m’s terms of service] is yet another example of a tech company taking away an individuals’ right to their own data.”

How has Zoom addressed these concerns?

However, after users raised red flags, the company made a further update to its policy and said, “Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.”

In a blog post, Zoom’s chief product officer Smita Hashim said that its intention with the change was to make sure that if it provided value-added services (such as a meeting recording), it would have the ability to do so without questions of usage rights.

“The meeting recording is still owned by the customer, and we have a licence to that content in order to deliver the service of recording. An example of a machine learning service for which we need licence and usage rights is our automated scanning of webinar invites / reminders to make sure that we aren’t unwittingly being used to spam or defraud participants,” she clarified.

Does this mean Zoom will not use any data to train its AI?

Not really. Zoom said it will use “service generated data” which it considers belongs to the company. Service generated data includes telemetry, diagnostic data, etc.

“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. For example, it is helpful to know generally what time of day in a particular region we have heavy usage so we can better balance loads in our data centres and provide better video quality for all of our users,” Hashim said in her blog post.

How will consent work for data fed into Zoom’s AI?

Zoom said that it will not use audio and video data from calls for training its AI without a user’s consent. This is where the catch lies. The problem here is that the company allows one person – the host of a particular meeting on Zoom – to offer such consent on behalf of all other participants.

As a person on such a call where the host has consented to sharing data with Zoom’s AI, one has only two options – either to accept Zoom’s terms or to leave the meeting. Users can not individually opt-in or opt-out of the service if they are not the host of a call.

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“If the administrator consents and it’s your boss at your work who requires you to use Zoom, how is that really consent?” Katharine Trendacosta, director of policy and advocacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, asked.