Experts, however, still have concerns. “The other question is, will employees be able to grant access to the entire company?” Sullivan said, noting that this could lead to spilling of trade secrets to train AI models, especially for brands that use Zoom on a daily basis.

Bottom line

Zoom—which saw wide adoption during the Covid-19 pandemic—is not new to privacy criticism. The company was hit with an $85 million class action lawsuit in April last year for security issues that enabled hackers to crash virtual meetings, known as Zoom bombing.

Sweeping policy changes, especially to keep up with ever-evolving technologies such as GenAI, are inevitable. How Zoom’s new policies play out in privacy-sensitive situations remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence platforms from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Google’s Bard, as well as image-generation tools like Midjourney, have drawn criticism for being trained on public data.