Be careful with Zoom guys.
Edit: It seems that they have updated their TOS , however I will never trust a company like this , remember with all of this AI going around right now Data is the new oil.
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If you need teleconferencing with screen share I highly recommend Jitsi. Easy to set up, pretty low system requirements, and open source.
On the thread about this on HN someone posted a link stating Jitsi has the same policy as Zoom regarding this matter. It’s equally bad.Edit: I stand corrected, apologies. It’s not the same policy as zoom.
https://www.8x8.com/terms-and-conditions/privacy-policy
It doesn’t seem the ToS supports your claim. Can you provide a link?
Seems they may ask to use the meeting data if you record or livestream, but not otherwise. So not equally bad.
from “4. Your Content” (emphasis mine)
You give 8×8 (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that Your content works better with the Service), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, and distribute such content solely for the limited purpose of operating and enabling the Service to work as intended for You and for no other purposes.
Despite the good intention from the company, this sounds like lawyer-speak that legally protect them if they decided to use your content to train ML model. IANAL though.
But it’s not the same as Zooms policy. I agree. I stand corrected and edited my original comment.
I’m talking about using a self-hosted Jitsi instance. That one will work on a completely air-gapped network so you don’t have to share data with them.
I feel like I’m missing something, but air gapping a video conferencing system seems counterproductive
Not if you have a large facility that needs videoconferencing and needs to be secure. Ostensibly there would be people who are also on the airgapped network.
Sadly incorrect.
Louis Rossman has a video about zoom trying to sponsor him, Jitsi request only what is needed for functionality only and there terms of service mention that explicitly. How do you blur a background without detecting a face etc.
rustdesk too!
Not sure if they have only just added a clarification, but it now says
Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.
Which seems to imply that by agreeing to their TOS, you are giving consent for them to use this.
Doesn’t it also call out that any recordings are fair game
Zoom got on the map because of covid and now that that’s over and working from home isn’t as popular as it was a couple years ago they need to figure out another way to make money, looks like they are selling customers data to do so.
Zoom isn’t even allowing their employees to be remote anymore !
Fuck ze plebs! They zoom from office!
They got on the map because they were easier to use, which was a reputation earned by doing things like hijacking pre-install verification scripts to install it, running an always on and non-uninstallable server on your computer without you knowing, so it could access your webcam without needing to open the app, faking system prompts to get your root password…
Then there was lying about end to end encryption being enabled, and sending the unencrypted traffic to China for no discernable reason
Zoom is just a shitty company that has never been on the right side of user privacy. They’ll do anything to make a buck.
How zoom managed to become a thing, while alternatives already existed and were rather well known is beyond me.
What were the alternatives? One thing I can say about zoom is that it’s easy to use, barely ever has any issues and handles a huge number of participants without a sweat.
I recall having used MS Teams before. But it often wouldn’t work, had server issues and couldn’t handle large audiences well.
Skype, hangouts, discord.
None has enough functionality.
I don’t see those as alternatives. Skype was always really buggy, sometimes it worked, other times it didn’t. Didn’t have great cross platform support and wasn’t suited for meetings without 500 - 1000 people. I used it in the past and it was always a huge pain to deal with.
Hangouts is nice for 1:1 chats, but it feels lacking. Last time I tried to have a screen share in a separate window it already failed to do so.
Discord isn’t really an enterprise tool.
Like… I don’t really want to defend Zoom, but the one thing they do just works.
Zoom was used a lot for small groups. Maybe for 500 - 1000 there is not much - not my user case. But people started to use it for small group meetings, and the the audio quality (in the sense how it manages multiple people talking) was always better with other software.
We use Google Meet at work. It’s basic but does the job
I think it was because they were the only platform that supported meetings with thousands of participants. This became very important during the pandemic, but now that we are over it, they are circling the drain.
But people started using it for small groups, for some reason. They had somehow amazing PR.
Title probably needs to be reworded. Terms clearly mention they won’t use it without user consent, not that they MUST use it. Doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way, but just don’t consent for it when asked and you’re probably okay (I’m mentioning this for those who have no choice but to use it, for things like work)
But if you don’t consent, do they still let you use their services? I’m going to bet that, at best, it’ll be designed to make users think they must consent to use the service.
Who knows, guess we’ll find out. The only point I was trying to make is the title of the article being misleading to an assumption rather than fact. It’s very possible what you just mentioned is the case, but we won’t know until later. My personal concern is the fact Zoom is used for work for many and getting around that for most folks will be the hard part. I hope the terms for free users vs business agreements differ.
So don’t agree to the terms of service? This could count as consent.
What does consent consist of? Most other TOS state that using the product means you consent to whatever is included in the TOS.
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They have just updated the ToS tho to now exclude using your data without permission for training AI. But Jitsi Meet is still a better option ;-)
“Hey, Joe, tell people we won’t use their data for AI without their permission!”
“But… they already gave permission by accepting the TOS, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, but they’re too stupid to realize that. So just keep repeating that we won’t use their data without their permission. That’ll get ‘em off our backs.”
Every day I thank the stars I never got involved with any of that shit back in 2020
Fuck my company. All the shitty companies cut IT workers and because of that they have to rely on microsoft and zoom.
When they says “recording” do they mean any video chat you have or only those you record and save?
This is why you don’t want to use the “free” version.
Do paid users not have to consent to the same TOS?
Nope; enterprise Zoom has its own flexible TOS; large companies actually negotiate terma with them (you know, a real TOS contract).
I stopped using the free version in mid-pandemic because of their TOS changes.
Good alternatives you can self-host are Nextcloud Talk, Jitsi, BigBlueButton, Unhangout, and Matrix. Find a community instance of any of these if you don’t have the chops to host your own.
