Zoom Tries to Blur its Own Background—Quietly Changes Terms of Service to Allow AI to Train on User Information

Zoom failed to provide its users control over their personal information when it quietly updated its terms of service, requiring users to sacrifice their privacy in order to fuel Zoom’s artificial intelligence program. Specifically, the new terms of service required users to 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.” Users raised alarms and called on privacy advocates and legal experts to consider whether Zoom’s policy was acceptable in terms of consent, data privacy, and individual rights, with one user saying: “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.”