Zoom was the subject of controversy this week regarding a March update to the software’s terms of service, which said users’ calls could be used to train artificial intelligence programs.
In response to the uproar, Zoom quickly backtracked, tweaking their terms of service to clarify that customer video, audio, and chat content won’t be used to train AI “without your consent.” But everything else is still fair game.
“It leaves lots of other data that's covered by this terms of service that they might want to use for training AI,” Cody Venzke, senior counsel for surveillance, privacy & technology at the ACLU, told KNX In Depth’s Rob Archer and Charles Feldman.
Right now, Zoom says the AI usage is limited to a handful of features that users have to opt into, like automated meeting summaries. But, as Venzke points out, that could change at any point in the future.
There’s also the question of what “customer consent” really means – especially considering that every Zoom customer unwittingly consented to the previous update’s wide-reaching terms for months before anyone noticed.
Venzke says clicking accept on a long, jargon-filled terms of service is “sort of a legal fiction.”
“And it's not just what is consent, but who is giving the consent?” he added. “Zoom is also not something you use by yourself … You might be joining a Zoom call where they have indeed consented to this use of AI, and you don't have any other choice if you want to participate in that call.”
Zoom itself confirmed this possibility in its blog post about the controversy, including a screenshot of a pop-up notifying a meeting attendee that the host has enabled an AI feature that allows data collection. The only two options given are “Got It” and “Leave Meeting.”
“It's worth stepping back and asking, how did we get to this particular situation?” Venzke asked. “And the answer is, really, without a national law regulating what companies can collect on us and what they can use that data for, we're kind of subject to what companies put in their terms of service and how they interpret them.”
This isn’t the first time Zoom’s data privacy has come under fire. In 2020, the company settled with the FTC over its “deceptive” security claims. The company also paid an $85 million settlement in 2021 over charges that it illegally shared user data with Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn.
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