Zoom is a popular service for conducting online meetings with audio, video, screensharing, recording, etc.
Zoom has changed its Terms of Service to include two important changes:
A. It can now use your service generated data to train its AI models. The text of Terms of Service is:
You consent to Zoom’s access, use, collection, creation, modification, distribution, processing, sharing, maintenance, and storage of Service Generated Data for any purpose, to the extent and in the manner permitted under applicable Law, including for the purpose of … machine learning or artificial intelligence.
This means that they can check how long one uses the service, at what times they use it, and any other usage data (possibly, but not including, what features of the service are used and for how long).
B. Zoom has also offered two features – Zoom IQ Meeting Summary and Zoom IQ Team Chat Compose.
Both these services are available to the user on a free trial basis.
BUT, if the user uses these services to create a summary of their meeting, or to create chat messages for the entire team, their content will then be used to train Zoom’s internal AI engine.
In short, this means that they pay to use a AI solution currently in training and also give up their content to provide training to that engine. Amazon’s Alexa also works in the same way – user’s content, including their voice samples, are used to train Alexa’s speech recognition.
Zoom tries to explain
After privacy concerns were raised by specialists and other users, Zoom put out an explainer.
In this blog post, Zoom indicated that the content generated by the user while using Zoom is owned by the customer but if they use the optional services, they will give their content for the training of Zoom’s AI engine. The consent is turned on when the user activates the feature and can be turned off by the user if they want.
However, here is the interesting thing. When we unchecked the box and clicked on Accept, the popup was closed.
But, after that, the settings screen looks like this:
Even after turning OFF the free trial feature, the data sharing was turned ON. This means that even when the user is not using the Zoom IQ, Zoom can use the participants’ content for its internal AI training.
Zoom also indicated that the Service Generated Data – technical data about how the service is used, is owned by Zoom and will be used to train their AI engine.
To quote from the explainer:
There is certain information about how our customers in the aggregate use our product — telemetry, diagnostic data, etc. This is commonly known as service generated data. 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 centers and provide better video quality for all of our users.
To sum up
Zoom can use content to train its AI if we do not specifically turn off that setting. To get that setting, log into the Zoom professional account, go to Account management > Account Settings > Meetings > In Meeting (Advanced) and check the Data Sharing permission.
This option is only available to paying members of Zoom.
