Facing backlash, Zoom says it won’t use your videos or chats to train AI without consent

Zoom recently updated its terms of service to add an interesting clause, seemingly giving the company broad permission to use customer data to train its AI products.

After a bit of backlash, the company later added a point-by-point note to the TOS, stating that it will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train its AI models without first receiving customer consent.

Section 10.2 of Zoom’s updated terms says that customers “consent to Zoom’s access, use, collection, creation, modification, distribution, processing, sharing, maintenance, and storage of Service Generated Data” for “any purpose,” including “machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for training and tuning of algorithms and models).” 

Section 10.4 goes a step further and says that customers “agree to 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 use their data for things like “product and service development,” machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

It’s easy to see how that might give users a bit of pause.

In a blog post this afternoon, Zoom’s chief product officer, Smita Hashim, reiterated that the company does not plan to use customer content, or audio or video, to train its models without first receiving consent from the user. She also goes into detail on the offending sections of the TOS and what the company’s intentions were for each.

Zoom recently launched two new AI features: Zoom IQ Meeting Summary and Zoom IQ Team Chat Compose, which offer meeting summaries and AI-powered chat composition, respectively. The blog post notes that Zoom account owners or administrators have to opt in for these features to work, and in the case of an administrator opting in, meeting guests will also be notified that data is being collected when they join the call.