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This is a nice statement, but the TOS is the important part, not what this marketing piece says. > You agree to grant and hereby grant Zoom a perpetual, worldw
by berbec 3y ago
This is a nice statement, but the TOS is the important part, not what this marketing piece says.
> 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.
> (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
- mplewis 3y agoThe TOS has been updated to state the following: > Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dr_monster 3y agoApparently the TOS can be edited at any time to say anything without notice. It’s worth mentioning that per this agreement they can still do almost anything else with that data. They could put your face up on a billboard if they wanted to. I’m out. I was a paying user. Can’t run fast enough from ever doing business with them again.
- sleepybrett 3y agoHow about analyze all the meetings from company x in order to insider trade or perform some other kind of corporate sabatoge.
- nomel 3y ago> or perform some other kind of corporate sabatoge. Webex seems to be the "corporate" video conference service, when secrets are a concern, from my experience.
- gnfargbl 3y agoWhich provider will you be moving to, and have you checked that their ToS are more acceptable?
- Simorgh 3y agoThis is the question! Is there anything anyone would recommend on security grounds? Enterprise may resonate with something with Signal level e2ee. Has anyone tried Element IO, as an example, in a commercial setting? Asking for a friend.
- fsflover 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37021910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37021910
- freedude 3y agojitsi https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/
- aftbit 3y agoIf you don't need the "advanced" zoom features, I can highly recommend Jitsi. Free public service and you can self-host if you need it. We have been running a fully remote company with 90% of meetings via Jitsi since COVID with great success. I recommend Chrome over Firefox though, as FF's WebRTC support is behind Google's.
- cudgy 3y agoDoesn’t using a Google product taint the solution, if privacy is a major concern? Also, WebRTC leaks ip addresses when using a VPN. What is the secure way to video conference? Webex? FaceTime offers end to end encryption, but can not easily share non-mac os screens. Articles like this sure make me like Apple sometimes https://9to5mac.com/2023/07/20/apple-imessage-facetime-remove-security-law/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/07/20/apple-imessage-facetime-remov...
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- nwoli 3y agoPer the agreement using the service can probably be considered consent. Ie “we won’t use your data without your consent” translates to legal code “if you accept the TOS which you do if you use the app, then you’ve given consent”
- mnw21cam 3y agoThat argument wouldn't fly in a court of law in the EU/UK, but many many companies try it on anyway.
- JohnFen 3y ago> Apparently the TOS can be edited at any time to say anything without notice. Yes, as with most terms of service. It's one of the things that makes terms of service statements unreliable.
- esperent 3y agoThis is not true. At least in the US you are required to notify customers when you change the terms of service, and as far as I know in the EU as well.
- JohnFen 3y agoI'm well aware of the US court ruling in the early 2000s that declared the users must be notified of ToS changes. And yet, companies frequently change ToS without providing such notification in a way that customers will actually notice anyway, so it doesn't seem to matter much.
- fragmede 3y agoUnfortunately it's like Gmail. Even if I'm not using them, enough other places do that it's not feasible to totally avoid them without adding complications to my life. Those complications might be worth it to you, but eg my therapist's office uses Zoom for the backend of their app. You'd never know it unless you're the kind of person to dig into that.
- nabakin 3y agoEdit: they added the line back again -_- They just made another edit and removed the line. Here's the edit history going all the way back to March: - 4/1 https://www.diffchecker.com/dCuVSMnp/ https://www.diffchecker.com/dCuVSMnp/ - 7/1 https://www.diffchecker.com/Zny4Rjqw/ https://www.diffchecker.com/Zny4Rjqw/ - 8/7 https://www.diffchecker.com/ER0RHSdb/ https://www.diffchecker.com/ER0RHSdb/ - 8/8 https://www.diffchecker.com/RLiqgAaA/ https://www.diffchecker.com/RLiqgAaA/
- littlestymaar 3y ago> without your consent. †but we'll prompt you an overly long privacy policy including such consent whose acceptation is just a checkbox you tick the first time your join a call without even paying attention (nor choice)
- pseudosavant 3y ago"...will not use...to train..." (emphasis mine) They'll do inference all day long, but not train without consent. Only being slightly paranoid here, but they could still analyze all of the audio for nefarious reasons (insider trading, identifying monetizable medical information from doctor's on Zoom, etc). Think of the marketing data they could generate for B2B products because they get to "listen" and "watch" every single meeting at a huge swath of companies. They'll know whether people gripe more about Jira than Asana or Azure Devops, and what they complain about.
- btown 3y agoThis is really important, and I would further emphasize the word our. Zoom doesn't need permission to "train" their own in-house artificial intelligence model when it can just transmit/sublicense that data to someone else who will train a model, or to an internal team who will use it (perhaps in few-shot prompts at scale, which is not technically training a model!) for "consulting services" in the broadest sense that that team can imagine. I generally feel like the general slowdown of capital availability in our industry will lead/is leading to companies doing a lot more desperate things with data than they've ever done before. If a management team doesn't think they'll survive a bad couple of quarters (or that they won't hit performance cliffs that let them keep their jobs or bonuses), all of a sudden there's less weight placed on the long-term trust of customers and more on "what can we do that is permissible by our contract language, even if we lose some customers because of it." That's the moment when a slippery ethical slope comes into play for previously trustworthy companies. So any expansion of a TOS in today's age should be evaluated closely.
- bonestamp2 3y ago> If a management team doesn't think they'll survive a bad couple of quarters (or that they won't hit performance cliffs that let them keep their jobs or bonuses) Agreed, and these kinds of short-term incentives are one of the problems with American companies. On the flip side... Japanese companies think about products in decades -- the product line has to make money 10 years from now. Some old European brands think about their brand in centuries -- this product made today has to be made with a process and materials that will make people in 100 years think that we made our products at the highest quality that was available to us at the time.
- stefan_ 3y agoThat still allows them to broadcast your meeting in a feature film of their choice. No, this is insane. The only reasonable option here is (1) end-to-end encryption or (2) ephemeral storage purely for the provision of the service.
- singleshot_ 3y agoA very powerful example of the difference between the words “will” and “shall.” Hats off to zoom for the free contract drafting lesson! [edit: thanks to HN commenter lolinder for the actual lesson].
- lolinder 3y ago> You can use "will" to create a promise--a contractual obligation. See Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage 941-942 (2d ed., Oxford U. Press 1995). When used in this way, "will" is not merely stating a future event, it is creating a promise to perform: > > Landlord will clean and maintain all common areas. > In most basic contracts, I recommend using "will" to create obligations, as long as you are careful to be sure any given usage can't be read as merely describing future events. I'm generally against "shall" because it is harder to use correctly and it is archaic. https://law.utexas.edu/faculty/wschiess/legalwriting/2005/05/shall-vs-will.html https://law.utexas.edu/faculty/wschiess/legalwriting/2005/05...
- singleshot_ 3y agoSo, I get that you’re downvoting and contradicting, but are you sure we don’t agree? Let’s put it this way: I was observing precisely what you copied and pasted: this is a perfectly valid way to write a contract if you subsequently want to be able to argue either side. Was zoom careful to be sure any usage can’t be read as merely describing future events? Will ambiguity exist until this agreement is tested ?
- lolinder 3y agoGiven that they use "Zoom will" 21 times in the document to clearly refer to their obligations—including 4 times in the paragraph entitled "10.5 Our Obligations Over Your Customer Content"—I seriously doubt they're counting on or will get points for any ambiguity. Meanwhile not once do they use "Zoom shall". It's pretty clearly just a stylistic choice and not anything sneaky. Edit: They even use "will" in the all-important phrase "you will pay Zoom". Surely you don't think they meant to be sneaky in that usage, and that is merely meant as a prediction of future events?
- fbdab103 3y agoDoes that mean they could sell the data and let someone else train their AI model without consent?
- fabbari 3y agoInteresting that they limited the clause to only audio, video and chat. Looking at their definition of Customer Content it means that they can use, for example, documents you shared, transcripts, a very nebulous ‘outputs’ and visual displays. So they can create a transcript of the conversation and train with it. Or train on any document you may have shared during a Zoom meeting. I woukd have preferred the exception - if that was the intent - to enumerate the components of the Customer Content that they want to use for training. 10.1 Customer Content. You or your End Users may provide, upload, or originate data, content, files, documents, or other materials (collectively, “Customer Input”) in accessing or using the Services or Software, and Zoom may provide, create, or make available to you, in its sole discretion or as part of the Services, certain derivatives, transcripts, analytics, outputs, visual displays, or data sets resulting from the Customer Input (together with Customer Input, “Customer Content”);
- nabakin 3y agoIt's gone. They removed this part. https://www.diffchecker.com/RLiqgAaA/ https://www.diffchecker.com/RLiqgAaA/
- nabakin 3y agoAaaand now it's back
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gchamonlive 3y ago> redistribute, publish, import, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create This is very Technologic
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoIt's missing "pickle" and "ferment", but I guess there's not enough culinary influence at Zoom HQ.
- robertlagrant 3y agoThey should use more Python.
- denton-scratch 3y agoThey're also allowed to use it twice. Also, they can distribute it, and then redistribute it.
- Imnimo 3y agoYeah, if the TOS says one thing, and a blogpost pinky-promises another, only one of those two actually counts as far as I'm concerned.
- Animats 3y agoThe AI part isn't the bad part. It's the "use for marketing", like gMail. One implication is that lawyers can no longer use Zoom for anything which is attorney-client privileged.
- jonplackett 3y agoHow does this add up with E2EE? They claim they can’t read anything passing through the server. Is there some other way they’ll get access? https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360048660871-End-to-end-E2EE-encryption-for-meetings#:~:text=Zoom's%20E2EE%20offering%20uses%20public,have%20the%20necessary%20decryption%20key https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360048660871-End-t....
- thesimon 3y agoE2EE is not the default mode for Zoom.
- bananapub 3y agoe2ee is not the default, and is incompatible with some of their other features like "cloud recordings". they also got caught being malicious and/or dumb in the past (https://www.businessinsider.com/china-zoom-data-2020-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/china-zoom-data-2020-4) so there's no reason to bother with them now.
- 14 3y agoI have not had a chance to read up on this yet but does zoom not have a paid version or corporate version that would not follow under these same TOS? If not it seems crazy like a shot in the foot because lots of businesses use zoom and I know most want or are required to use privacy preserving programs.
- ethbr0 3y ago> You agree to grant and hereby grant Zoom [...] license and all other rights required or necessary to [...] create derivative works [...] > [...] 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 [...] Those two clauses, coupled with the current murky state of AI-from-copyrighted-material, should make everyone run screaming from Zoom as a product that can be entrusted with confidential information.
- happytiger 3y agoWe can drop them from all of our portfolio companies and I personally can as well. But what are the best alternatives at the moment? Zoom is very popular…
- willsmith72 3y agoI find google meet pretty good. The zoom desktop client kills my mac, but the web client doesn't have great performance. Meet performs better in the browser for me
- nightpool 3y agoEvery time I try to use Meet in an up to date Google Chrome MacBook, it makes my entire browser stutter. And it's much worse than the Zoom desktop client when it comes to audio cancelling and visual quality
- robertlagrant 3y agoIf you use Slack their video calling is pretty good these days, at least for internal calls.
- cbsmith 3y agoThe marketing piece explains why you might want them to let them have these rights. The TOS are what you're giving up in exchange.
- flower-giraffe 3y agoIt is perhaps a sign of how pervasive the assumption that a subscriber is an asset rather than a stakeholder that they have thought it is reasonable for a commercial communication service to claim copyright on private communications of their subscribers. Can you imagine the response to telephone company saying they can use your voicemail messages for their own purposes.
- neltnerb 3y agoIt is illuminating to do a search for the word "consent" in the document, considering they say that they will not use things without it. Seems like it might be worth them including, IANAL. Otherwise can't they just change it in the website UI...? They don't promise any particular process for acquiring consent, but sure declare you give it to them for many many other things.
- walrus01 3y ago> but the TOS is the important part, You think a TOS that's biased towards the company, or the customer, has any legal effect on a Chinese domestic corporation that's subject to the laws and regulations of the Ministry of State Security? Really?
- wfme 3y agoThe terms have since been updated. It's still an interesting lesson in spin when the change they made looks like this https://diffcheck.io/y-_v1LkBYyk4WBueHX https://diffcheck.io/y-_v1LkBYyk4WBueHX
- esperent 3y agoIt's very hard to read that on mobile. What changed?
- wodenokoto 3y agoIf my hours of watching legal eagle on YouTube qualifies me to give legal advice for a country I don’t even live in then yes, that marketing statement can have very real influence on how a court is willing to interpret the agreement between Zoom and its users.
- mikro2nd 3y agoFunny how people have been granting pretty much the same batch of rights to Microsoft for decades when they used Skype, and nobody minded. In addition Skype's ToS granted MS a licence to any and all IP you might discuss during a Skype call.[1] I wonder why no businesses were bothered by that...? [1] ...decades ago, I don't know how it reads now, can't be arsed to check.
- gmerc 3y agoTimes have changed. AI invokes existential dread.
- raverbashing 3y agoThey have amended the TOS with this statement: > Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.
- dolmen 3y agoThe main point is that "You agree" is the customer, not the end user. Which means that in the case where Zoom is provided to you by your employer, they claim that the employer consent is just what matters. Once more "Fuck GDPR".