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.
At this point if we go back to messenger pigeons I half expect to see spam tied to the other leg.
I love how there’s a whole generation of people who think that we went straight from email to to Slack and Discord. There was a whole, vibrant, ecosystem of XMPP and IRC services before these walled gardens showed up and supplanted open protocols in order to data mine their users.
I’m preaching to the choir in here, obviously, but we’ve been preaching this gospel for years and nobody cared. Not looking so crazy now. Unfortunately, the damage is done. Privacy has lost.
Privacy has been beaten to a bloody pulp, but the fight doesn’t need to be called yet. Don’t give up, keep telling everyone you can. I know things are looking low right now, but every person you reach matters.
In the case of Zoom, an approach that could actually work is having every step of the solution already completed if you’ve got an employer trying to push Zoom on employees. Make sure you can clearly state here’s the problem, here’s why it’s dangerous for the company, here’s a great alternative, here’s why it’s safest for the company, and here’s how you install it. Reach out to the IT dept if you’re not the IT dept to get them on board. If the advice is coming from multiple employees, that will help your case.
I have gone back to using XMPP and have my family and friends using it. There has been a uptik in development of this protocol and the mobile apps have gotten way better. Facebook, whats app, google, and countless others all started with XMPP/jabber and they all could talk to each other. That is until they walled them off to try and force everyone on to there app. Its so dumb that we had a federated chat system that was taking hold until the big tech players got involed and sucked up the users then turned off federation. Chat could and still can be like email if there is critical mass on one of these federated protocols so everyone will start useing it.
My phone number is run though my XMPP server, no matter what phone or computer I use I can access my phone number. Hell I could drop my phone plan all together, if I wanted to and just use wifi for calls. 90% of the time im connected to wifi anyways. I use jmp.chat and the android app cheogram you should check it out.
How did you set up your phone number to go through your own XMPP server? That sounds awesome.
I guess that’s what jmp.chat does.
It seems like it’s a managed solution though
Sorry to disappoint you, but a can of spam may be too heavy for a pigeon.
It could grip it by the husk.
Laden or unladen?
(Sorry, I only vaguely remember the sketch)
What you’re saying is: It’s not a question of where he grips it; it’s a simple matter of weight ratios?
Can of spam sure, but they happen to sell a 2.5oz single slice bag of spam. Surely a pigeon should be able to carry that.
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.
That was admin decision, not courts. But anyway looks like your location has [NOT] been greased properly but don’t worry I am sure some clown is working on it as week speak. Those juice public sector contracts are prime time for corruption.
If you need teleconferencing with screen share I highly recommend Jitsi. Easy to set up, pretty low system requirements, and open source.
rustdesk too!
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.
Including enterprise calls? Lots of companies use this for client calls etc…
Ya, I’m gonna have to see if we need to blacklist this for our org now. That’s not gonna be popular.
My huge corporation banned us from ever using it ever. They were iffy on it before, so previously we were only allowed to use it if we don’t handle any sensitive data, but now we aren’t allowed even have it be installed, they don’t trust any of it
Impressive. I know many corps still use Leveno laptops even though they got caught putting spyware in their firmware.
Got a link for that? First time I’ve heard that.
Apparently this has happened more then once. I can find more articles once I’m on my desktop, but here’s one of the more recent examples.
https://ophtek.com/lenovo-laptops-shipped-with-new-malware-risk/
Thanks. My company had lots of Lenovo devices. I wonder if they’re aware of this stuff.
I use Jitsi professionally. Never had a problem. I send a link over and they hop on via the web interface and get it working quickly without prior knowledge of the platform. Oh ya, minor detail: it’s FOSS.
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.
THIS! When I read Zoom’s response to the tweet that was the focus of this original post, my initial thought was “…but you are having them agree to terms without an opt-out”
Doesn’t it also call out that any recordings are fair game
Zoom’s about to try and claim their click through EULA trumps client-attorney privilege. Let’s see how that goes for them.
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.
I’ve heardabout Jitsi, what else is out there? Is there a list for these?
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!
The hypocrisy
Well, being a slave master aint easy
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.
RIP Zoom
On any non-open source or cloud based software, assume all opt out switches go to /dev/null
So, they’re recording and stealing our corporate secrets, etc? That’s going to go down well.
So, I suppose this means the end for Zoom use in business, no company is going to allow their intellectual property and secrets to be used by another company, especially what is essentially just their telephone call provider.
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.
Gotomeeting, WebEx, bluejeans.
I was using WebEx for the longest time and our company switched to zoom. I recall that it was only for price and that there was a lot of missing functions that our team was used to.
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.
None has enough functionality.
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.
MS Teams and Google Meet that mandatorily required Microsoft and Google accounts, as opposed to Zoom that did not need one, unless you were hosting video group chats? There is your reasoning. Also, Zoom’s stability with multiple participants and on low connection speeds makes it stand out.
Remember when everyone was buying zoom stocks?
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.”
That’s not creepy/scary AF
I’ll never trust a company that thrived in the pandemic.
All of tech sector did. It is not a good reasoning method. Be logical, not emotional.
