WOWSAHS

Zoom is covering themselves with good news in the past 24 hours or so. I hardly know which outraged group to focus on first: customers or the help.

I think I’ll go with the paying stiffs first, since we use Zoom for things around here, too. This was interesting:

🚨Zoom in! Discuss confidential or proprietary information on #Zoom? It is time to look for a new platform. The terms of service now allow for machine learning and #AI and grant irrevocable rights to #zoom. This is especially relevant to those in #healthcare. #privacy @Zoom pic.twitter.com/MJScZJmFHh

— John Nosta (@JohnNosta) August 7, 2023

Zoom’s updated terms of service has people looking for new ways to chit chat. Using private conversations – and owning their content in perpetuity – for your creepy AI functions?

We think not.

…The latest update to the video platform’s terms of service front-loads sections on software licensing, beta services and compliance, but if you read past that, the fine print seems to reveal a key decision in Zoom’s AI strategy. The update, effective as of July 27, establishes Zoom’s right to utilize some aspects of customer data for training and tuning its AI, or machine-learning models.

The “service-generated data” that Zoom can now use to train its AI includes customer information on product usage, telemetry and diagnostic data and similar content or data collected by the company. It does not provide an opt-out option.

This isn’t an uncommon data category for companies to use for these purposes, but the new terms are a measured step toward Zoom’s own AI ambitions.

The update comes amid growing public debate on the extent to which AI services should be trained on individuals’ data, no matter how aggregated or anonymized it’s said to be. Chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing, along with image-generation tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, are trained on swaths of internet text or images. Across the generative AI sector, lawsuits have popped up in recent months from authors or artists who say they see their own work reflected in AI tools’ outputs.

So, with “no opt-out option,” your data checks into Zoom and never leaves.

Well that's interesting…#Zoom pic.twitter.com/Qw9SwpxI4y

— Mrgunsngear (@Mrgunsngear) August 7, 2023

As you can imagine, the push-back was instantaneous and furious. People do actually read the fine print in this day and age, and, man – they did not appreciate the Big Brother vibes and privacy grab.

Well time to retire @Zoom, who is basically wants to use/abuse you to train their AI https://t.co/b6dNCO77aY

— Gabriella "Biella" Coleman (@BiellaColeman) August 6, 2023

Zoom quickly went into damage control mode, with a blog-post entry explaining how all this fuss was really about nothing – a misinterpretation on users’ end. They issued a “clarification” for the Luddites which said customers could still “opt out” of sharing “summaries data” with the company…whatever tf that is.

The videoconferencing app Zoom said Monday it won’t use customers’ data without their consent to train artificial intelligence, addressing privacy concerns of a growing number of customers over new language in the app’s terms of service.

…The blog post emphasized that meeting administrators can opt out of sharing meeting summaries data with Zoom. Non-administrator meeting members are notified about Zoom’s new data-sharing policies and are given the option to accept or leave meetings.

“Zoom customers decide whether to enable generative AI features, and separately whether to share customer content with Zoom for product improvement purposes,” a Zoom spokesperson said in a statement. “We’ve updated our terms of service to further confirm that we will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.”

But savvy users and people who religiously read privacy notices put the hammer down on Zoom’s “clarity” moonlight and roses, because there was no stated intention by the company to change the language in the agreement. According to that, if you use Zoom, you’ve sold your soul and your chat to it.

I'm afraid unless you give users the option to opt out of having their data used in training AI, we're going to have to boycott your product. Unless you can verify that video content itself is not used in training. This is horrible optics.

— Jim (Still Spooky) Wright (@JWr1ghtBra1n) August 7, 2023

Major accounts who use the company for research meetings, etc., have already announced they are moving their business away from Zoom to other platforms.

…Janet Haven, the executive director of Data & Society, a nonprofit research institute, and a member of the National AI Initiative advisory committee, said concerns over the emerging tech go beyond Zoom’s terms of service and represent long-standing concerns over data privacy.

“I think that the fundamental issue is that we don’t have those protections in law as a society in place and in a kind of robust way, which means that people are being asked to react at the individual level. And so that is the real problem with terms of service,” Haven said.

This was stupidly done, dudes It’s not like you’re in any great position to be pissing people off.

.

Speaking of “pissed off people,” HOW ‘BOUT THOSE ZOOM EMPLOYEES, y’all?

You should be able to see the smoke rising from here.

Zoom Staffers Are Furious as Remote Work Declared Dead in Ironic Twist of Fate

The company that once carried the work-from-home movement on its back has admitted defeat.

Zoom recently announced its new “structured hybrid approach,” requiring employees to return to the office at least part-time.

Now, some of its employees are pissed, according to comments from the popular tech community app Blind, which verifies users through their work emails but allows them to post completely anonymously.

…Blind users said that the return-to-office (called “RTO” by some) announcement was made by CEO Eric Yuan at an all-company Zoom meeting last week. The plans will apparently only apply to employees who live within 50 miles of a Zoom office. The company, founded in 2011, is headquartered in San Jose.

“CEO basically said, ‘take it or leave the company’ in the meeting lol,” Blind user ZP2, who identified as a Zoom employee, wrote on Saturday. “The irony is you need to go to office but every meeting is via Zoom,” ZP2 added in another comment.

Yeah. They’re so hot, they’re smokin’. But the realities of the economic situation they’re facing right now versus two years ago has management scrambling to stop the bleeding. And across the board, unpleasant news or not, RTO in some form or another appears to be the solution for even companies like Zoom whose very birth depended on the concept of remote work.

…During a tense meeting last week about the return to office policy, held on Zoom, Eric Yuan, the chief executive, faced a series of questions from employees who expressed frustration about the time and money they’d waste while commuting, according to an employee who was at the meeting but was not authorized to speak publicly about internal company matters.

In 2020, participants in daily Zoom meetings leaped to over 300 million, from 10 million the year before, as it became the most downloaded free iPhone app of the year. But the company has struggled to maintain its pandemic growth. In February, amid a wave of layoffs across the tech industry, Zoom cut 15 percent of its staff, or about 1,300 people. The company’s work force had grown more than 275 percent between July 2019 and October 2022.

On an earnings call in May, Mr. Yuan said he was confident in the future of workplace flexibility and the benefits it had brought for his company. “I think hybrid work is going to stay,” he said.

Zoom, like many other tech companies, is still holding on to some flexibility, requiring its employees to come in only on a part-time basis.

…But many of those companies realized that they didn’t want their employees to remain permanently scattered. Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist and expert on hybrid work, said the tech industry’s move back to the office was no surprise given the amount these companies spend on office real estate.

Mr. Bloom said Zoom, for example, had all the downsides of fully remote work — some employees feeling disconnected — without the company seeing its financial upsides, like saving money on office space, because the company was still paying for Bay Area real estate and Bay Area employees.

“They’re paying for their office and hiring local people so they get no upside from being fully remote,” Mr. Bloom said. “The most surprising thing to me was they took so long to formally announce this.”

Oh, I don’t think it was surprising it “took so long” to announce it. Look at what happened when they did – and to all the other companies that went before them.

As well, those other firms didn’t have “remote” as the very reason for their existence.

Guess I should pay closer attention to notices on other platforms.