Last week, Zoom found itself amid controversy after updating its terms of service to include language that could be taken to mean that the videoconferencing service could use customers’ video calls to train AI. The terms of service update read, in part:
“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 …. 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.”
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Unsurprisingly, Zoom immediately received a wave of backlash, as users were by-and-large staunchly against agreeing to let their calls be used to train AI. Zoom Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim responded by publishing a blog post backpedaling on the “we can train AI on your data” aspect of the update in an attempt to assuage users, which reads in part: “Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments, or other communications like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or third-party artificial intelligence models.”
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Since publishing the blog post, Zoom has since updated its terms of service once again to more accurately reflect the company’s stance on training AI models. According to an update to the blog post, these changes were made “based on customer feedback” to make the company’s policies “easier to understand.”
