Zoom Revises Terms After Changes Spark Fears of AI Learning From Video Chats
A day after controversy erupted over months-ago revisions to Zoom’s terms of service that evoked fears of their video chats being harvested for AI training, the company raised its virtual hand to say that it would never do such a thing without permission.
The new text, added in March as part of a sweeping rewrite(Opens in a new window) of the video-conferencing app’s terms(Opens in a new window), appeared to give Zoom the right to train AI systems on the data and content of calls.
A Sunday post on the web-developer blog Stack Diary(Opens in a new window) called out two parts in particular. Section 10.2 allowed Zoom to use diagnostics data for purposes including “machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for the purposes of training and tuning of algorithms and models).”
Another, section 10.4, reserved similar rights to customer-generated content for a list of uses that included “machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing.”
As of Monday afternoon, that second section has a new paragraph in bold below it: "Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.”
In a blog post Monday(Opens in a new window), Zoom Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim wrote that Zoom had earlier rewritten its terms to be more transparent about its workings, not to lay new claims to user data.
“Section 10.2 covers that there is certain information about how our customers in the aggregate use our product — telemetry, diagnostic data, etc.,” she wrote. “We wanted to be transparent that we consider this to be our data so that we can use service-generated data to make the user experience better for everyone on our platform.”
Read more on pcmag.com
