How Zoom’s terms of service and practices apply to AI features

It’s important to us at Zoom to empower our customers with innovative and secure communication solutions. We’ve updated our terms of service (in section 10.4) to further confirm that we will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.

As part of our commitment to transparency and user control, we are providing clarity on our approach to two essential aspects of our services: Zoom’s AI features and customer content sharing for product improvement purposes. Our goal is to enable Zoom account owners and administrators to have control over these features and decisions, and we’re here to shed light on how we do that and how that affects certain customer groups.

We strive to provide transparency about data ownership in our terms of service. These terms of service work together with our privacy statement and in-product privacy notices, which in turn aim to ensure that usage of customer content is based on your consent.  

We changed our terms of service in March 2023 to be more transparent about how we use and who owns the various forms of content across our platform. 

1. In Section 10.1 (coupled with 10.6), our intention was to make clear that customers create and own their own video, audio, and chat content. We have permission to use this customer content to provide value-added services based on this content, but our customers continue to own and control their content. For example, a customer may have a webinar that they ask us to livestream on YouTube. Even if we use the customer video and audio content to livestream, they own the underlying content.
2. Section 10.2 covers that there is certain information about how our customers in the aggregate use our product — telemetry, diagnostic data, etc. This is commonly known as service generated data. We wanted to be transparent that we consider this to be our data so that we can use service generated data to make the user experience better for everyone on our platform. For example, it is helpful to know generally what time of day in a particular region we have heavy usage so we can better balance loads in our data centers and provide better video quality for all of our users.
3. In Section 10.4, our intention was to make sure that if we provided value-added services (such as a meeting recording), we would have the ability to do so without questions of usage rights. The meeting recording is still owned by the customer, and we have a license to that content in order to deliver the service of recording. An example of a machine learning service for which we need license and usage rights is our automated scanning of webinar invites / reminders to make sure that we aren’t unwittingly being used to spam or defraud participants. The customer owns the underlying webinar invite, and we are licensed to provide the service on top of that content.  For AI, we do not use audio, video, or chat content for training our models without customer consent.

We will not use customer content, including education records or protected health information, to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent. 

We routinely enter into student data protection agreements with our education customers and legally required business associate agreements (BAA) with our healthcare customers. Our practices and handling of education records, pupil data, and protected healthcare data are controlled by these separate terms and applicable laws.

We recently introduced two powerful generative AI features – Zoom AI Companion Meeting Summary and Zoom AI Companion Team Chat Compose – on a free trial basis to enhance your Zoom experience. These features offer automated meeting summaries and AI-powered chat composition. Zoom account owners and administrators control whether to enable these AI features for their accounts.

When you choose to enable Zoom AI Companion Meeting Summary or Zoom AI Companion Team Chat Compose, you will also be presented with a transparent consent process for training our AI models using your customer content. Your content is used solely to improve the performance and accuracy of these AI services. And even if you choose to share your data, it will not be used for training of any third-party models. 

Here is an example of our UI through which a customer admin opts in to one of our new generative AI features. 

We inform you and your meeting participants when Zoom’s generative AI services are in use. Here’s an example of how we provide in-meeting notification.

To reiterate: we do not use audio, video, or chat content for training our models without customer consent.

We remain committed to transparency, and our aim is to provide you with the tools you need to make informed decisions about your Zoom account. We value your privacy and are continuously working to enhance our services while respecting your rights and preferences.

Thank you for being part of the Zoom community. Together, we’ll continue to create meaningful and seamless collaboration experiences through Zoom.

Editor’s note: This blog post was edited on August 7th, 2023 at 11:30 a.m. PT to include the most up to date information on our terms of service.