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.
On any non-open source or cloud based software, assume all opt out switches go to /dev/null
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.”
Zoom was always a gigantic shitshow and borderline illigal in a lot of countrys.
More than borderline, but no court ever gives a fuck
Schools in my country are not allowed to use it at all, so they kinda do.
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.
Fuck my company. All the shitty companies cut IT workers and because of that they have to rely on microsoft and zoom.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
As I understand it’s extortionate consent though. Either you “consent” to your private data being used in this way, or you can’t use Zoom.
Good thing there’s self hosted and E2EE alternatives.
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