Update, 7/8, 4:20 pm: The updated user agreement turned out to be too confusing. Zoom saw itself obligated to publish a blog today that should clarify matters. Section 10.4 should allow the video platform to provide additional services without requesting additional consent from the user. This involves, for example, obtaining an audio recording of the meeting in order to develop it into a summary. It further adds: “For AI, we do not use audio, video, or chat content for training our models without customer consent.”
Original, 7/8, 3:30 pm: Zoom is adjusting its terms of service to get more user data into its training set for AI. All users are asked whether they want to share content to improve its services, but through a loophole, Zoom also seems to be allowed to use data from users who disagree.
A new user agreement from the video platform Zoom specifies that it can use user data for training and refining machine learning and AI. Users will be asked if they want to share content to improve services. Without agreeing to this, users can still test out new AI features.
For example, through AI, Zoom can write a summary of your meeting or provide a full transcript of everything said. Without your consent, this transcript may not be included in the training set for AI models, as indicated in section 10.2.
Loophole?
Section 10.4 then provides another perspective: “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: (i) 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.”
The terms both reflect different realities. Because of the contradiction in the user agreement, it remains unclear to users whether their data will remain out of AI’s training models if they desire to.
Spokesmen bring no clarity
A Zoom spokesperson already responded to the article that appeared on Stack Diary discussing the updated terms of service. “Zoom customers decide whether to enable generative AI features and separately whether to share customer content with Zoom for product improvement purposes,” they specified.
With this, the spokesperson reiterated what is in section 10.2, but there is no official answer about section 10.4.
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