Zoom rectifies AI data collection policy after raising privacy concerns

Zoom says it won’t use customers’ data without their consent for AI training in response to growing criticism regarding their silent terms and conditions update that allowed them to do so.

In March 2023, Zoom updated its terms and conditions, reserving the right to scrape customer accounts, including potentially confidential meeting videos and file uploads, for AI data collection. The initial paragraph stated that users agree to “grant Zoom a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license” for various purposes, including “machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing, improvement of the Services, Software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software, or any combination thereof.”

The change went unnoticed until May 2023 when Zoom announced partnerships with AI firm Anthropic to bring its “Claude” virtual assistant to the platform and with OpenAI to create a tool called “Zoom IQ” meant to create summaries of meetings, writes CPO Magazine.

After facing criticism and boycott from some of their users, the company updated the terms and conditions to confirm that “Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments, or other communications like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or third-party artificial intelligence models. Zoom account owners and administrators control whether to enable AI features for their accounts, for example, the Zoom IQ Meeting Summary feature”.

How to turn Meeting Zoom IQ on/off

Meeting summary with Zoom IQ allows meeting hosts to initiate an AI-generated summary of their meeting. When the host enables this feature in a meeting, participants will automatically receive a summary after the meeting ends.

According to Zoom, this feature is, by default, off. You can check or enable it, after signing in to the Zoom web portal.

1. Click Account Settings.
2. Click the Meeting tab.
3. Under In Meeting (Advanced), click the Meeting Summary with Zoom IQ toggle to enable or disable it.
4. If a verification dialog displays, click Enable or Disable to verify the change.

Read more about the Zoom IQ Meeting Summary, here.

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