10/08/2023
For those of us using Zoom regularly for our work, it’s been a scary week. So I thought I’d share my understanding and the decision I've made.
The furore is over Zoom’s terms of service. Zoom has updated their terms of service to say that the content of calls can be used to train artificial intelligence (with an important exception, please read on).
Obviously this is something that therapists will want to consider very carefully and may have ethical objections on the basis of:
• Client confidentiality and privacy
• Informed consent
• Client self-censorship
• The possibility that therapists could be replaced by AI
After being challenged on their terms of service, Zoom provided more explanation and some clarification.
Zoom uses AI to provide certain services such as meeting summaries and intelligent chat. *This is something that you, as the meeting host, must enable*.
Please note, this is not an automatic feature and is not turned on unless you specifically request it.
Once you have enabled AI, your meeting attendees will be asked for their consent for the material to be used. This is like the consent that you give when a call is recorded. If the meeting attendee does not give consent they will have to leave the meeting.
Zoom has stated explicitly that:
“For AI, we do not use audio, video, or chat content for training our models without customer consent”
Therefore, if you do not want the content of your calls to be used to train AI, please do not enable any of Zoom’s AI features.
I have not enabled these features and so I will continue to use Zoom for my work.
