Zoom has addressed its AI training controversy, with Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim writing a blog post to shed light on the company’s policies.

Zoom quietly changed its terms of service a couple of months ago, adding in clauses that allow it to use customer service data to train its AI. Needless to say, the revelation is not going over well with the company’s customers.

Hashim has written a blog post aimed at reassuring customers. The pertinent sections of her post are quoted below:

1. In Section 10.1 (coupled with 10.6), our intention was to make clear that customers create and own their own video, audio, and chat content. We have permission to use this customer content to provide value-added services based on this content, but our customers continue to own and control their content. For example, a customer may have a webinar that they ask us to livestream on YouTube. Even if we use the customer video and audio content to livestream, they own the underlying content.
2. Section 10.2 covers that there is certain information about how our customers in the aggregate use our product – telemetry, diagnostic data, etc. This is commonly known as service generated data. 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. For example, it is helpful to know generally what time of day in a particular region we have heavy usage so we can better balance loads in our data centers and provide better video quality for all of our users.
3. In Section 10.4, our intention was to make sure that if we provided value-added services (such as a meeting recording), we would have the ability to do so without questions of usage rights. The meeting recording is still owned by the customer, and we have a license to that content in order to deliver the service of recording. An example of a machine learning service for which we need license and usage rights is our automated scanning of webinar invites / reminders to make sure that we aren’t unwittingly being used to spam or defraud participants. The customer owns the underlying webinar invite, and we are licensed to provide the service on top of that content. For AI, we do not use audio, video, or chat content for training our models without customer consent. (Emphasis theirs)

Overall, the company’s clarification is sure to reassure many users. Hashim reiterated that customers own their own data, and that AI is not trained on any audio, video, or chat content without the customer’s consent. Hashim also makes clear that the platform’s AI features and AI data collection can be disabled.

Unfortunately, Hashim’s statements seem to directly conflict with what Section 10.4 actually 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: (i) as may be necessary for Zoom to provide the Services to you, including to support the Services; (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; and (iii) for any other purpose relating to any use or other act permitted in accordance with Section 10.3. If you have any Proprietary Rights in or to Service Generated Data or Aggregated Anonymous Data, you hereby grant Zoom a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary to enable Zoom to exercise its rights pertaining to Service Generated Data and Aggregated Anonymous Data, as the case may be, in accordance with this Agreement.

While Hashim may be accurately stating what Zoom’s intent is, the fact remains that Section 10.4 is so overly broad in its application that it can be interpreted any number of ways.

In addition, the company is clearly going to continue to collect service generated data, defined as “telemetry, diagnostic data, etc.,” with no option for customers to opt out of that collection. As Hashim states, “we consider this to be our data.” And, as the TOS outline, the company will use this data to train its AI and ML models:

You consent to Zoom’s access, use, collection, creation, modification, distribution, processing, sharing, maintenance, and storage of Service Generated Data for any purpose, to the extent and in the manner permitted under applicable Law, including for the purpose of product and service development, marketing, analytics, quality assurance, machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for the purposes of training and tuning of algorithms and models), training, testing, improvement of the Services, Software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software, or any combination thereof, and as otherwise provided in this Agreement.

Zoom’s clarification is clearly something of a mixed bag, eliminating some of the biggest concerns with the new policy while leaving others.