Let’s Zoom in

Zoom, a company that became a household name during Covid times, is in the spotlight again and for all the wrong reasons. Its checkered past with privacy and security is enhanced now by Zoom's claim that it has rights to all the data flowing through its servers.

A little history to provide the context here. The company was founded in 2011 by ex-Webex engineers, who thought that there must be a better way to conduct  online meetings. Most people thought that it was a crazy idea. It was the year when Skype was dominating the consumer market. Meanwhile, Webex was the standard for corporate online conferencing. There wasn't a place for another entrant. And yet, Zoom was able to make inroads and now is part of the Nasdaq-100 composite index.

How did Zoom manage that? With one simple thing - user experience. Compared to other products, it was somehow, almost magically, integrated with your device or other application. One simple click and a Zoom call started and you could have a conversation right then and there. But everything comes with price, especially when the product is free.

The product design team skipped some good security practices and conveniently was not worried about privacy. Reading the list of privacy and security issues, one is surprised that the company is still around.

It got so bad, that in 2020, the CEO ordered a freeze on any new features and spent the next 90 days just fixing security issues. While the marketing team was touting that Zoom provided end-to-end encryption, it was later revealed that it meant only between the end user client and Zoom's servers. Perhaps not a big deal until you learn that some of the calls were routed through Zoom's servers placed in China, where Zoom has to obey the local laws ... With success comes a higher level of scrutiny.

But that was then and today the competition is as brutal as ever. Finding new ways to retain or even gain new customers is difficult. Microsoft with its Teams and one-click conferencing is good enough for many users and is a nightmare for Zoom. How can Zoom differentiate when voice and video conferencing became a commodity?

AI to the rescue!

Imagine the good old days of the Zoom simplicity but now enhanced with features like providing a summary of your conference call or sending individual participants a list of todo's based on the promises they made during the conference call. The list can be endless. But here is the problem. How can you build something like that? How can you train the AI to do all these amazing things? Well, you train it on the user data. On your users data!

That's why Zoom changed its Terms of Service in March, 2023. First unnoticed, like any legal thing, it just  appeared until it was noticed. (Recurrent Pattern - With success comes a higher level of scrutiny.) The language, specially out of context, read like a red booklet from a totalitarian state - 'Zoom may 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 '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'.

The cherry on the cake? The new Terms of Service also included a new clause: 'READ THIS AGREEMENT CAREFULLY, AS IT PROVIDES, AMONG OTHER THINGS: (i) in Section 27, that you and Zoom will arbitrate certain claims instead of going to court and that you will not bring class-action claims against Zoom'. The section 27 includes terms like 'Jury Trial Waiver', 'Mass Action Waiver', 'Bellwether Arbitrations' and other amazing terms which only lawyers tell to their kids instead of bedtime stories.

All this was enough to light up the Internet. The idea of creating greater transparency as to how Zoom was going to process the data on its platform backfired and became a PR nightmare. Zoom's Chief Product Officer wrote a blog post this week trying to explain how things were meant to work. Zoom quickly adjusted the language to be even more transparent and explicit.

But the result was a deluge of articles like Zoom Revises Terms After Changes Spark Fears of AI Learning From Video Chats from PC Magazine, Zoom's Updated Terms of Service Permit Training AI on User Content Without Opt-Outon Stackdiary, or Zoom says it isn't training AI on calls without consent (but other data was fair game) on AP News. You can see the blood in the water and the sharks are coming.

All the transparency appeasement feels artificial when Zoom is telling you that it will be the arbiter for your legal complaints and none of the users can start a class-action lawsuit.

The chickens are coming home to roost. Marketing departments are in overdrive to hype the AI paradise. Product people are trying to find something which would differentiate their products against their competition. Now the details of training the AI are coming to the forefront more and more. Zoom is only the latest example of it. OpenAI with its ChatGPT has already been suedby numerous parties for using their content without permission or providing erroneous answers. All these companies are facing the same problem - how to train AI to be useful without the required data. Zoom is trying to get around by sneaking legal language to do that. You can bet that any company claiming the use of AI in their product will have their Terms of Service carefully examined.

Here is an idea for Zoom. Cancel free accounts on your platform. If people using your product are not  willing to pay for the value you provide, why should they use it for free?

Zoom, do you see value in gathering data from your users to train your AI? Offer your users the ability to exchange their communication for the free use of your product in exchange for their data. This will create the transparency you desire without the need to hide behind legal language. Make real transparency the recurrent pattern. Everyone will benefit.