The changes were first noticed and highlighted on the Hacker News forum.

An addition to the ToS on Monday says: "Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent." Apart from that the terms remain the same.

Exactly which part of the ToS will hold in the event of a legal stoush over the use of customer data remains to be seen.

Zoom makes no mention of what it can do with what it calls "service generated data", which it gets from analysing content and behaviour of customers. This includes data on telemetry and usage among others.

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

In a blog post, chief prodiuct officer Smita Hashim wrote: "...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."

Additionally, the company says: "...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 licence 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.

Zoom updates its Terms of Service to become the NSA 2.0:

I'm in disbelief at this update because of how far-sweeping it is, yet here we are. Direct quotes from section 10.2

"You consent to Zoom's access, use, collection, creation, modification, distribution, processing,… pic.twitter.com/YemC2Q6es5

— Andrew Cote (@Andercot) August 7, 2023

"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."

Of its generative AI features, Hashim says: "We recently introduced two powerful generative AI features – Zoom IQ Meeting Summary and Zoom IQ 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 IQ Meeting Summary or Zoom IQ 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 chose to share your data, it will not be used for training of any third-party models."