If your Monday feeds are filled with people threatening to never use Zoom again, you’re not alone. There are posts everywhere claiming Zoom is using your video calls to train its AI models. It turns out they’re kinda right, but it’s not the full story.
What’s going on with Zoom?
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Zoom recently updated its terms of service. Usually, that alone doesn’t make headlines. However, with these updates comes new language that seems to suggest the company is taking your data and training its AI models with it. Yikes.
Of particular note are the 10.2 and 10.4 sections, which specify that by using Zoom, you give the company permission to use “service generated data” you produce, as well as “customer content” data you produce, for—among many other things—“machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for the purposes of training and tuning of algorithms and models).”
As the terms of service are written in legalese meant to both cover Zoom as much as possible (as well as, likely, to confuse), it isn’t overly clear what data in particular the company is taking for these purposes. Service generated data includes telemetry data, product usage data, diagnostic data, and similar content or data, while customer content consists of data, content, files, documents, or other materials you provide, upload, or originate, in combination with derivatives, transcripts, analytics, outputs, visual displays, or data sets Zoom provides to you.
For context, “video,” “audio,” or “calls” are not mentioned here, but it seems safe to assume that data falls under “Customer Content.”
Zoom’s response, and how it supposedly uses your data
As Mashable reports, Stack Diary first noticed the changes on Monday. Online fervor spread quickly, with some users going so far as to say they’d never use the service again—not hard to blame them when you imagine your video calls between coworkers and friends being used to train a crummy Zoom robot.
Zoom definitely took note, as the company issued a blog post in the hopes of clarifying its positions. They highlighted that certain sections of the policy were designed to say that customers own their own video, audio, and chat data, and that “service generated data” is simply analytical data produced while using the service (such as the time of day calls are placed, or how long calls tend to last).
Most importantly, however, the blog post emphasized this, bold text and all: “For AI, we do not use audio, video, or chat content for training our models without customer consent.”
This appears to be true. Zoom will not collect your data to train its AI models unless you opt in to one or both of its optional AI features: Zoom IQ Meeting Summary and Zoom IQ Team Chat Compose. When you fire up the AI summarizer or AI chat assistant for the first time, you’ll have the option to disable “Data Sharing,” the feature that sends your call data (among other data points) to Zoom for possible AI training. Even if you leave this setting enabled, you can disable it after the fact.
So, as far as that goes, it seems like a poor rollout from Zoom: The company should have been more transparent about what it’s trying to do here, publishing the blog post from the beginning so customers know how to disable this data collection should they want to use the AI features without having their chats used as AI training fodder.
However, the story isn’t quite over. See, those controls are great to have if you’re the one enabling the AI features. But, at this time, it doesn’t appear as if participants of a meeting with “Data Sharing” enabled have the ability to stop their data from ending up in Zoom’s AI laboratory. When you jump into a call with an administrator trying out one of these new AI features, you’ll receive a pop-up letting you know. However, you only have the option to leave the meeting or stay. If you join, and the admin has “Data Sharing” enabled, Zoom can collect your call. It shouldn’t be on Zoom users to check in with the leader of a call and make sure they have “Data Sharing” disabled before the meeting moves forward.
Plus, this data collection option only applies to customer content: Since Zoom considers service generated content its property, it will take this data to do with as it pleases, including for machine learning purposes. Zoom did not answer Gizmodo’s questions about this data, so there’s still some murkiness as to exactly what data Zoom takes in this category.
Should I stop using Zoom?
Look, Zoom is hugely popular, especially in the workplace. If your company uses Zoom to host its digital meetings, there’s not much you can do here. If you lead calls, avoid using the AI features, or at least ensure “Data Sharing” is disabled. If you aren’t leading a call, ask the admin to check these settings.
Zoom obviously has some perks as a video conferencing app, but it’s not the most secure one on the planet. (Remember Zoombombing?) You can enable end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for calls, but you lose out to a host of features when you do.
As such, if privacy and security is your focus, you might want to consider a service that emphasizes both. Apple’s FaceTime, for example, is E2EE by default, and doesn’t save your calls in any capacity. If you can swing it, it might be a good Zoom alternative in a pinch.