Towards Big Brother or a Storm in A Teacup? Zoom and T&Cs

Towards Big Brother or a Storm in A Teacup? Zoom and T&Cs

“You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.”

― George Orwell, 1984

Perhaps, George predicted the Internet? And, so, Zoom updated its T&Cs to include the use of data captured from machine learning and AI:

You agree to grant and hereby grant Zoom a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary to redistribute, publish, import, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content and to perform all acts with respect to the Customer Content,” including for the purpose of “machine learning” and “artifical intelligence” “ for the “improvement of the services, software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software.”

A serious question here is whether this breaches the rights to privacy and where the information from a conversation could be used to train an AI model and then not traceable. The update caused a social media storm, and Zoom has since reported that it will not be using data from conversations in AI training and hasn’t altered its approach to using private data (and where they can use it for data analysis and marketing purposes).

A core part of the new set of T&Cs is that there is no opt-out, and a paid subscriber must agree to them or not get the service. The focus of Zoom’s approach is that conversations can be used for marketing and analytics and have now for machine learning and AI. This must worry many companies as many discussions might include private information, such as those related to a competitor’s products, and which could be used in the model. And there are no limits set on the usage of the data. Included in this might be sensitive patient data from discussions between a clinician and a patient.

So, you need to take careful consideration in using Zoom. At the current time, there is some confusion on whether Zoom will actually use audio, video or chat within AI systems. But it is unlikely that Zoom would do this without the consent of the user — otherwise, this would be a significant breach of privacy.

Overall, Zoom seems to be focusing on new generative AI features: Zoom IQ Meeting Summary and Zoom IQ Team Chat Compose. These will allow automated summaries of meetings and where the chat can be analysed for meanings. The new T&Cs thus focus on the ability to use these new features with a recorded chat.

An update to their T&Cs now says:

further confirm that we will not use audio, video or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent

This seems to define that the audio, video and chat is still owned by the customer but that they give a licence to Zoom to apply AI-generated services within their meeting (if enabled).

Overall, the backlash against AI continues at a pace, with the SAG-AFTRA and WGA going on strike for improved protection against AI in the film industry, such as in the usage of “digital replica”.

Conclusion

If only George Orwell could grace the planet — we’d be a whole lot more informed about whether our world is moving towards a Big Brother state.