Zoom can use your private calls and messages to train its AI systems thanks to new terms and conditions that YOU agreed to

Private video calls, text messages and meetings on Zoom might be used to ‘train’ artificial intelligence models.

The San Jose company’s new terms and conditions – which came into force in March but were spotted this month – have sparked a wave of outrage online, with users threatening to cancel their accounts over the change.

In one section of the new T+C’s, it says that customers consent to Zoom using data for purposes such as ‘machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for the purposes of training and tuning of algorithms and models).’

Artificial intelligence models are commonly trained with large amounts of publicly available data, often taken from the internet – but Zoom’s move would use private customer data, raising privacy fears.

Zoom has responded with a blog post this week, claiming that the data is only used to train AI models to summarize meetings more accurately, and only with customer consent.

In a blog post, Zoom’s Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim wrote: ‘To reiterate: we do not use audio, video, or chat content for training our models without customer consent.’

But that hasn’t stopped users from growing concerned about their privacy.

Elliot Higgins of news organization Bellingcat said: ‘We run our training workshops on Zoom, so Zoom is effectively planning to train its AI on our entire workshop content with no compensation, so bye-bye Zoom.’

The data used to ‘train’ AI models has become a legal battleground in the wake of the rapid advances in generative AI technology such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Users and businesses fear that private information could be inadvertently revealed – or artistic works plagiarized – if their data is used to train AI models.

Google recently changed its privacy policy to allow the company to train AI models on publicly available information on the internet.

The new policy says, ‘For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities