Zoom has introduced revisions to its Terms of Service that have sparked significant controversy over user privacy.

It appears that Zoom may begin using calls between millions of users around the world to train AI products. The updated terms contain two standout sections, 10.2 and 10.4, which hold considerable implications for the extent to which Zoom can leverage user data. These segments specify Zoom’s entitlements to gather and utilise “Service Generated Data,” encompassing telemetry data, product usage information, diagnostic data, and analogous content collected in conjunction with users’ use of Zoom’s services or software.

Explicitly specified in Zoom’s revised policy is its exclusive ownership over Service Generated Data. This dominion extends to the company’s prerogatives to alter, disseminate, process, exchange, retain, and warehouse said data “for any purpose, within the limits and parameters stipulated by applicable law.”

“…You agree to grant and hereby grant Zoom a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary to redistribute, publish, import, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content and to perform all acts with respect to the Customer Content, including AI and ML training and testing.”

Of particular concern is the overt declaration of the company’s right to employ this data for the training and enhancement of machine learning and artificial intelligence systems, with the inclusion of algorithm and model refinement. This particular clause raises the question of a lack of opt-out alternatives, something that is bound to fuel intense debate about user-generated consent and individual privacy.

Zoom justifies these measures as indispensable for delivering services to patrons, supporting the services, and enhancing its range of offerings including software and other products. Nevertheless, the implications inherent in these clauses are all-encompassing, particularly as they seemingly permit Zoom to harness customer data for any purpose associated with the activities or processes detailed in section 10.3.

Remarkably, Zoom has not issued any comments regarding these amendments yet. While Zoom’s motivations may center on elevating their platform and providing an improved experience, the extent and profundity of these adjustments are likely to cause disquiet among numerous users, particularly security and privacy advocates, thereby prompting inquiries into how their data is being leveraged.

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Advanced meeting room spaces that support hybrid working have become popular in recent years (no prizes for guessing why) and are big asset to partially or wholly remote workforces.

However many organisations find the hardware choices bewildering – so before choosing a conferencing kit for your meeting room, here are three key questions you need to ask:

Where’s that call coming from?

If you’re a devotee of either Microsoft Teams or Zoom, it’s easy to believe the entire world uses the same meetings software.

Stop and consider this for a moment and it should be immediately obvious there’s a problem here. Not all of your customers or suppliers will have standardised on the same choice as you necessarily – and that’s not even to mention rival platforms, or indeed traditional phone calls.

More modern Microsoft Teams Rooms devices also provide native support for scheduled Zoom meetings &/or Cisco Webex, and HDMI override that’s compatible with alternatives like Google Meet. We already escaped the world of restrictive hardware a decade ago, so let’s not go back there. Instead, it’s sensible to plan for a conference room setup where people can both make and accept calls in a variety of platforms, to cover all bases.

Connected to what?

How will the end-user actually make the call? This is important to think about – there are really three options here:

• From a fixed PC/Mac in the room
• From a device the user brings into the room with them
• From a dedicated conference suite that tracks its own scheduled meetings

Option 1 helps eliminate some common hardware problems like getting the right cabling/adaptors, but it’s likely to prove a bit restrictive the rest of the time. Option 2 gives users great flexibility over using the room, and can be paired with wireless hardware – as well as falling back on some other advantages of laptops, tablets or smartphones: like the user bringing their own calling platform and display, and familiarity with their own audio settings.

Option 3 goes a step further so that the room already understands what meeting is happening when, and often supports ‘single-touch’ join from a console or touchscreen. This is best for enterprise environments where the video/audio largely doesn’t change, and what you really need is for the conferencing software (Teams or Zoom) to control who is actually using the meeting room, and when.

But what’s the room like?

Don’t forget the practicalities – this isn’t just about the technology, but also the physical space.

How big is the room, and how is the seating arranged? Will a conference phone cut it, or do you need satellite microphones to make sure audio is captured? Where are the power sockets? This will determine how your plans overlap with the device choice. Monitors are often easier to use than projectors, particularly as more screen-sharing is taking place.

Camera angles are important if your room is large, although audio always takes priority – most of the time it’s more important that everybody can be heard clearly, rather than be seen.

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Microsoft, continuing the trend of growth in online communications during the COVID-19 pandemic, has informed on social media that their telecommunications app Microsoft Teams now has over 145 million daily users.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Microsoft Teams amassed an estimated 32 million daily active users – with an increase to 75 million users as the reliance on digital tools from the need to work at home dramatically amplified.

The figure is estimated to be about a 26% growth since October 2020 where there was an average of 115 million active users daily. This rapid growth in users has been paralleled with the expansion and inclusion of new features to the telecommunications app including the continual development of Teams Connect which allows the user to share channels with anyone internally or externally to their organisation, virtual meeting whiteboards and background effects for working at home environments; to name a few.

In relation to its competitors, Zoom revealed they had 300 million daily participants and Google Meet displayed 100 million daily participants. It must be noted that both these apps do not record daily users individually, but rather daily participants which implies that a single user could be logged several times if they attend multiple meetings during one given day. However, all these apps have undoubtedly experienced a rapid upsurge in user counts throughout 2020 and 2021 regardless of their user calculation systems.

CEO Natya Sadella states that the “digital adoption curves aren’t slowing down. They’re accelerating and it’s just the beginning”.

Future plans for feature incorporation into Teams include the interoperability with the new Microsoft Mesh, powered by Azure, which promises to be the office meeting’s digital leap into mixed reality technology combining both the physical and virtual world into one shared interactive environment.

For the Teams app itself, Microsoft has promised a host of new capabilities including end to end user encryption for one-on-one voice calls, ability to lock meetings to prevent unauthorised guests from attending and business branded lobbies where admins will be able to add custom logos to their Teams experience.

Zoom’s video-conferencing software has seen a surge in hacked video calls around the world, with a new phenomenon, ‘Zoombombing’, disrupting unsecured conference calls.

As large numbers of people work from home due to Covid-19, online trolls have begun searching for Zoom calls where meeting hosts have not passworded access or credentials are easily obtainable, and disrupting meetings with either audio or un-expected screensharing of inappropriate material to other attendees.

Zoom’s ease-of-use for beginners and freemium download option have proved popular in recent weeks with the platform surging to over 200 million users – a pattern also seen among similar conferencing platforms from Microsoft, Cisco, Google and others.

Automated Zoom conference meeting finder ‘zWarDial’ discovers ~100 meetings per hour that aren’t protected by passwords. The tool also has prompted Zoom to investigate whether its password-by-default approach might be malfunctioning https://t.co/dXNq6KUYb3 pic.twitter.com/h0vB1Cp9Tb

— briankrebs (@briankrebs) April 2, 2020

Cyber security experts have also highlighted the availability of automated Zoom-call hacking tools in the darker corners of the web – able to seek out conference calls without passwords for trolls to exploit.

Most experts believe Zoombombing intruders can be avoided with routine security precautions which should be taken by the host (and co-hosts) of any Zoom meeting.

In particular Zoom meeting hosts have been cautioned to:

1. Set a unique, complex password for every Zoom meeting
2. Generate a random ID for each meeting, try to avoid using your personal one. Zoom have published a helpful article on how to do this. 
3. Not share screenshots of their meetings. (Even UK Government Cabinet Ministers’ accidentally publishing shared calls with visible meeting IDs recently. Don’t do it!)
4. Avoid sharing meeting IDs on publicly visible social media or websites.
5. Disabling screen-sharing rights unless needed via Screen Share > Advanced Sharing Options > Who Can Share?
6. Enforcing Waiting Room prior to new attendees being permitted to join the meeting
7. Lock Meetings once all attendees are present via Participants List > More > Lock Meeting

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Apple have issued a silent update for video conferencing software Zoom, following discovery of a major webcam security vulnerability affecting Mac users.

Zoom issued an emergency patch for the problem two days ago – in a rapid response Apple was still concerned might not reach enough users.

The controversial web server installation – originally designed to save Mac-based Safari web browser users from additional clicks and make video conferencing easier to use, was shown to create a potentially serious vulnerability whereby Zoom calls could be launched from any website with the camera turned on.

In bizarre scenes, technology journalists researching the problem were even paired up in video conferences with other unknown individuals doing the same.

Believed to put at risk more than 4 million webcams globally, the zero-day exploit was discovered by security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh – who originally gave Zoom 90-days to resolve the issue prior to publication.

Leitschuh has since praised Zoom’s willingness to do a public ‘about face’ with the emergency patch, and Zoom’s CEO taking direct video calls to discuss the problem.

Nevertheless, Apple’s decision to step in to protect Mac users remains an embarrassment for the previously very successful video conferencing solution.

Additional problems include Mac versions of video conferencing software which use Zoom’s underlying services for white-labeled video calling – such as Ringcentral.

Instead of patching the problem, Zoom’s permission to turn on the webcam can also be disabled manually, via Settings > Video > ‘Turn Off My Video When Joining a Meeting.’

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