Zoom Alternatives: Why You Should Care About Zoom’s Intent to Harvest Data
Yesterday, Zoom updated its terms of service (effective immediately) to establish the video platform's right to harvest some of its customers' data for training its AI models.
But that was not all - they have also claimed the right to own your call content royalty-free in perpetuity. (Not just for the duration of your consumer relationship).
I sent an email to my subscribers about it, and I’ve been talking about it over on Facebook - and a lot of people have a lot of opinions - so this blog post is just addressing them in one place.
I don’t often show up and make bold assertions of being an expert, but in this instance, I am making that assertion. I am speaking from a place of research and professional expertise.
I am not speaking as someone who is a business owner and just has an opinion on social media.
I have been researching AI and machine learning since 2018, and I literally build AI-powered technologies.
This might be the first time you’ve realised that, but I am not new to this space or this conversation.
Disclaimers:
1. I haven’t read the terms of service for all of the companies mentioned in this post - but I will be doing a deeper dive into it over the next few days and publishing my summary.
2. I’m not a lawyer, I work in tech. And Big Tech has repeatedly demonstrated that they don’t really care about the law (or the law is outdated and doesn’t cover emerging technologies sufficiently to protect consumers/users).
3. We are reasonable, rational adults who decide the course of action that is right for us in light of the information available to us. I am sharing my opinions from my experiences, both professional and personal, but you are free to make the decision that is right for you.
4. Zoom’s issues with data privacy are not new.
Stay with Zoom, don’t stay with Zoom - it’s entirely up to you. As an AI professional, I will not be staying with them.
“They wrote a blog post explaining it.”
I’ve read it. Why are they addressing their literal legal terms in a blog post instead of amending their legal terms?
Anything they say on their social channels or their blog is designed to be a piece of marketing communication to rescue the perception of their brand.
Regardless of their marketing spin, they have acquired a company whose sole purpose is to build AI technology, and they have shown clear, public intention to mine data.
“They added an amendment.”
Since the immediate backlash, Zoom has added an amendment to the original terms, and they still have not removed the language around owning your content royalty free in perpetuity.
They have added a little bold sentence at the bottom of the clause - they have not amended the fundamental issues with the clause.
Here’s what it says (bold in 10.4 is mine for emphasis):
“10.4 Customer License Grant. 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.
Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.”
… But what are they defining as “training artificial intelligence models”? I guarantee, that is a loophole.
Why is it a loophole?
In 2021, Zoom acquired an AI startup called Kites - which “builds translation capabilities” - they fundamentally cannot train or build AI models without data, and have already demonstrated intent to misuse it.
Big Tech has exploited legal loopholes for years - that’s how we have large language models in the first place.
If a company SHOWS its intent in its black and white legal terms (regardless of how they have back-pedaled since they published it), and we continue to use it, we won’t be surprised in 10 years’ time when they found an alternative route to do what they wanted to do in the first place.
Big Tech have a history of not caring about the law - so the legal fact of whether Zoom has updated its terms of service is not a solution to this problem.
Zoom’s terms of service are the least of your concerns, all they’ve demonstrated is intent to find a way around them.
“I asked a lawyer…”
… And a lawyer will be great when they have misused your data and you need to sue them for breach of terms.
I’m not a lawyer, I’m someone who has spent almost 2 decades building things on the internet with emerging technologies.
And guess what - between a lawyer and a tech developer, a tech developer is going to be able to warn you about a company’s intentions before you risk your intellectual property and your business and client privacy in an almost entirely unregulated field that has centuries-old institutions scrambling to catch up with.
Mark Zuckerberg has been fined BILLIONS of dollars for breaking data privacy laws, and it’s a drop in a bucket.
Tech companies will abuse your data until they are forcibly stopped - and even then, fines are not a disincentive for them because they have more to gain from exploiting your data privacy than abiding by the law.
If a company *straight up tells you* that they intend to use your data for something, and only backpedals in the face of backlash, they will absolutely spent the next 3-5 years finding a loophole or doing it anyway.
You need to understand that these companies are in survival mode - their founders literally feel like if they aren’t at the cutting edge of AI, they will go out of business.
They are like cornered wolves, and they will use any means to justify their ends, and face the legal consequences later.
By arguing that platforms are safe to use because they’ve updated their legal terms, you’re bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Zoom has billions of $ of commercial interest in mining your data.
They have bought an AI company called Kites which builds “state of the art technology and predictive AI” - AI can only be built with data (which is why developments in AI stalled in the 70s and 80s).
Unless Zoom sells Kites or Kites drastically changes its technological focus, your data is at risk regardless of what their terms of service say.
The key thing we need to be more aware of generally is how buy-outs impact privacy - both when companies *buy* other companies and what that tells us about their strategy and intentions (e.g. Zoom with Kites) but also with the implications of independent tech being consumed by bigger players.
Independent tech is generally a safer option, but unfortunately SO many tech startups are started *with the intention to sell* to a bigger company as their core exit strategy, so the same 9 companies own pretty much anything with clout.
Before putting information into something, be it a social platform, a video conferencing tool, or something like ChatGPT, ask yourself this:
Would I be angry if, 5 years from now, this makes someone else $1 million?
And act accordingly.
“But Facebook and Instagram are already doing this.”
Facebook and Instagram aren’t places you have private calls with clients or discuss proprietary business information.
Zoom is a place for private calls so the idea that our standards for privacy should be the same on a call based software instead of a social media platform is not at all a solid reason for staying with Zoom as a company.
I don’t publish private client calls, business plans and proprietary information, or intellectual property on those platforms because I know that when I post on them, it is putting that information into the public domain.
We CANNOT have the same standards for data use for a public social media platform and a private video conferencing software.
And if we do, that should absolutely inform our willingness to use it.
“Royalty rights are needed for service provision.”
No, they’re not. How software uses customers' personal or proprietary data within software services is typically governed by privacy laws and service agreements, not royalty rights.
What could some of the potential reasons be for Zoom asking for royalty rights?
Here are some of the common reasons software companies ask for royalty-free rights to content.
Technical Requirements: to process or store call recordings for technical reasons, like ensuring the proper functioning of the service, providing customer support, or troubleshooting issues.
Feature Implementation: for features like transcription, translation, or analysis of calls. To provide these features, Zoom needs rights to process the recordings.
Compliance and Monitoring: they might need to retain or analyze call recordings for legal compliance, or to monitor for violations of their terms of service.
Marketing or Development: provisions allowing them to use call recordings (or excerpts or data derived from them) for purposes like marketing, training, or improving their services.
Data Analysis and Machine Learning: call data could be used for data analysis or to train machine learning models, which might require broad rights to use and process the data.
… All of which are vague and far-reaching.
Training AI Models vs Machine Learning
All Zoom has assured us of is that “Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.”
“Training artificial intelligence models” is DIFFERENT from machine learning as a whole, and this phrasing is purposefully ambiguous.
“Training artificial intelligence models” is a specific activity within the broader field of machine learning - and Zoom has NOT excluded machine learning in this phrase.
The specificity of this phrase leaves the door open for them to still use customer data for other machine learning purposes. To understand the implications of this, here’s a graphic:
But let’s be generous and say that yes, Zoom needs royalty rights for the duration of the time they are providing the service.
Why would they need them “in perpetuity”?
It is concerning and unnecessary for a company to request rights to your call recordings in perpetuity. Only some of them may be legitimate, but for the terms of service from a multi-billion dollar company, they have the resources to be specific and are choosing instead to have a vague, broad royalties requirement across your customer content.
My opinion
My professional opinion as someone who works in the AI space and builds technology is Zoom is not a company that is to be trusted with private information.
I’ve read their blog posts, their social posts, and opinions on both sides of this argument. I’m not panicking or fear mongering (and if you have been in my audience for ANY length of time, you will understand that I don’t *ever* condone fear as a motivator).
None of my peers in the AI and tech space are casually explaining this away.
The concerns around this are entirely valid, and we should be extremely concerned about our rights to privacy being chipped away by companies who think we have no alternatives.
I will absolutely not be using Zoom ever again, and it’s not because I’m panicking - it’s because I know how Big Tech works and I’m not about to risk my private data with a company who has shown intent to misuse it.
This absolute pillaging of people's conversations, content, and creativity is a blight on the face of commerce, under the guise of "disruption" - the Silicone Valley word for "abusive exploitation but make it palatable for venture capitalists".
Tech Alternatives to Zoom 🛠
We will be using Google Meet for our internal meetings for now until I’ve been able to do a deeper dive, and I am trialling out Streamyard's webinar feature this week because it embeds into our Community space on Heartbeat.
Once we've seen how Marketing Magic customers feel about that, I’ll be doing a bit more research and compiling the options into their own post.
Disclaimer Reminder:
I have not read the full terms of service for these yet. None of them are recommendations, they are just alternatives that provide the same function as Zoom: 1. Meetings and 2. Workshops, webinars, or group calls.
1. Zoom Meeting Alternatives
I’m including Teams and Google Meet NOT because I’m naive about the companies behind them, but because they are already there and are a quick and convenient replacement that will not cost you anything to use.
👉🏻 Teams: used by a lot of companies and organizations where data privacy is a concern and they refused to adopt Zoom due to historic concerns around data privacy.
👉🏻 Google Meet: which I’m using in the short term until I’ve looked elsewhere, but I’m keeping an eye on how Google is updating its own data privacy terms.
👉🏻 Jitsi Meet is being recommended as an open source alternative to Zoom for those who want none-Google or Teams meeting software. It’s free and fully encrypted.
👉🏻 WebEx has been used widely for yeeeears and always been a bit more corporate BUT they have Zoom-adjacent pricing plans and similar functions.
👉🏻 Butter: More below; it has mainly been recommended in the context of webinars but you can use it for meetings too, apparently.
👉🏻 Discord: Already popular for a lot of people in the open source community and streamer spaces, you can apparently do video calls in Discord - but I have not looked into this at all yet.
2. Zoom Webinar Alternatives
For doing 1-many calls e.g. teaching, workshops, webinars, and livestreams…
👉🏻 StreamYard, which can stream to different social channels but also has a $39/m OnAir feature (I’m trying this out later today as I like StreamYard generally)
👉🏻 Demio, which a few people use as a more affordable alternative to traditional “webinar” software.
👉🏻 Butter, which is based in the EU and as such, has to store data in a way that is compliant with the EU’s strict data privacy regulations (in the scheme of global privacy laws, the EU is doing a better job than most).
👉🏻 WebEx provides webinar functions too, but the pricing is more corporate.
Final reminder:
We’re all adults who make decisions with the information and faculties available to us. I have my strong opinion, yours might be different. I’m sharing mine here because I have professional expertise that means I can see where this is going, and I think it’s dangerous.
Here’s to embracing more independent tech.