Zoom rewrote its terms of service to say it will not use people’s content without permission to train the videoconferencing platform’s artificial intelligence tools.
The company revised its guidelines Monday amid growing concerns that Zoom may be used as a mechanism to invade people’s privacy and spy on them.
Zoom’s chief product officer, Smita Hashim, said the latest changes stress that the company will not train its AI models on people’s audio, video or chat without consent.
People participating on Zoom will be informed when the company’s generative AI services are in use, Ms. Hashim wrote on the company’s blog, and the company will give customers options for choosing to use its content for training AI.
“Your content is used solely to improve the performance and accuracy of these AI services,” Ms. Hashim wrote on the company’s blog. “And even if you choose to share your data, it will not be used for training any third-party models.”
Privacy concerns on Zoom are not limited to AI. The videoconferencing platform also is facing allegations that Zoom enables espionage by the Chinese government and hackers.
China’s efforts to infiltrate Zoom escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to author Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian in the book “Beijing Rules” published this month.
She wrote that Zoom’s rapid user growth in the pandemic’s early months coincided with growing demand from China’s security services to impose control over the platform, including blocking anyone it wanted around the world.
For example, Ms. Allen-Ebrahimian said China’s Ministry of State Security tasked Zoom employee Julien Jin with monitoring people beyond the country’s borders. Ms. Jin was charged by the Justice Department in 2020 with conspiracy to commit interstate harassment and is wanted by the FBI.
Zoom downplayed concerns about Chinese espionage as old news.
“The events discussed in this book occurred years ago, and we have taken significant additional steps since that time to navigate the challenges that arise when operating in China,” Zoom said in a statement to The Washington Times.
Fears that Zoom enables unwanted surveillance extend beyond China and remain ongoing. Three U.K.-based researchers said this month that they discovered a way to use Zoom to spy on what people are typing on their computer keyboards.
The researchers’ paper examining acoustic cyber threats said they used machine learning tools to accurately identify 93% of keystrokes recorded from the sounds of someone typing on a keyboard while using Zoom.
Zoom did not answer questions about the researchers’ work.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.