Zoom provokes outrage with changes to its terms of service on AI

Zoom has provoked outrage among its users after a change to its terms of service. This week, the company made a number of changes to its terms of service that related to the way it uses people's data and the content of their calls. They have led to widespread criticism from users, some of whom have quit over what they said was overly expansive permissions. In particular, critics focused on a passage in which users agreed to Zoom's "access, use, collection, creation, modification, distribution, processing, sharing, maintenance, and storage" of data "for any purpose". The new terms said that data could be used for a variety of functions, including "machine learning or artificial intelligence" such was training new artificial intelligence models. Many feared that the expansive rules would mean that Zoom could, for instance, use the data of meetings to train generative artificial intelligence systems. A number of companies have faced backlash over fears that they could be gathering user data with a view to training artificial intelligence systems using it, and customers have become increasingly concerned about the potential invasion of privacy and ownership that could present. But now Zoom has said that the terms were misunderstood, and updated them with a new line intended to make clear that chats would not be used to train AI systems. "Zoom will not use audio, video or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent," the terms now read. In a blog post addressing the controversy, Zoom said that it had introduced two new generative AI features, aimed at making it easier to summarise meetings and help with chats. At the moment they are offered on a free trial basis and administrators can choose whether they are turned on. "When you choose to enable Zoom IQ Meeting Summary or Zoom IQ Team Chat Compose, you will also be presented with a transparent consent process for training our AI models using your customer content," the company said in its update. "Your content is used solely to improve the performance and accuracy of these AI services. And even if you chose to share your data, it will not be used for training of any third-party models." Read More Now even Zoom tells staff: ‘Come back to the office’ OpenAI launches bot that will crawl the internet to educate GPT PayPal launches dollar-backed cryptocurrency