Zoom recently updated its Terms of Service to indicate in Section 10.2 that:
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 product and service development, marketing, analytics, quality assurance, machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for the purposes of training and tuning of algorithms and models), training, testing, improvement of the Services, Software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software, or any combination thereof, and as otherwise provided in this Agreement.
(Emphasis added)
And they also say in Section 10.4 that they can use Customer Content (e.g., the data you process through their platform):
as may be necessary for Zoom to provide the Services to you, including to support the Services; (ii) for the purpose of product and service development, marketing, analytics, quality assurance, machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing, improvement of the Services, Software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software, or any combination thereof;…
(Emphasis added)
But Zoom then insists later in Section 10.4 that:
Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.
Potentially due to the media attention and likely customer inquiries regarding these changes, they responded with a blog post explaining the change. According to the blog post, Zoom customers have control over whether audio, video, and chat content are used for AI training as part of its new Zoom IQ Meeting Summary and Zoom IQ Team Chat Compose services, which provide customers with automated meeting summaries and AI-powered chat composition.
The blog post’s comments clearly conflict with the Terms of Service; or at least, the Terms of Service fail to accurately reflect the nature of the license. The Zoom Privacy Policy further states that Zoom uses personal data in part to provide:
Intelligent Features: Zoom provides intelligent features and products, such as Zoom IQ or other tools to recommend chat, email or other content, that may use artificial intelligence, machine learning, or other technology to analyze and process your content and personal data to develop, provide and improve intelligent features and products.
(Emphasis added)
The take-away is that if you’re using Zoom with customers, prospects, or your own personnel, you may want to investigate these features and ensure Zoom’s use of the data aligns with your own permitted uses of the data based on your customer agreements, customer-facing privacy policies, personnel-facing privacy policies, and other internal data-related policies, such Acceptable Use Policies. Use of this data to improve Zoom’s own AI or other products may conflict with these other restrictions and/or may not be permitted under certain laws.
NB: Zoom’s COO participated in these two exchanges on Hacker News in which the community took a critical reading of the COO’s comments.