Zoom's updated terms of service allow AI training with customer data

Zoom, the popular video conferencing platform, has quietly updated its terms of service to include clauses giving the company the right to use certain aspects of customer data to train and improve its artificial intelligence and machine learning models.

The updated terms, effective July 27, allow Zoom to use "service-generated data," which includes customer information related to product usage, telemetry, diagnostic data and similar content collected by the company. Notably, this category of data does not include an opt-out option.

The revised terms state, "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 ... machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for the purposes of training and tuning of algorithms and models)."

However, customer content such as messages, files, and documents appear not to fall within this category. In a subsequent blog post, Zoom clarified that it does not use audio, video, or chat content for training its AI models without customer consent.

Zoom introduced two new generative AI features in June, namely a meeting summary tool and a chat message composition tool, both available for a free trial. Customers can enable or disable these features, and if enabled, they need to give consent for Zoom to process personal data to train artificial intelligence models using their customized content.