Zoom has updated its terms of service, effective August 11, 2023, to explicitly grant itself a “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license” to customer content for what the company calls “Permitted Uses.” That list includes improving the service, which critics say could cover training AI models on user data, with no opt-out mechanism mentioned in the terms.

The change was flagged on Hacker News where it quickly rose to the front page with over 1,500 points and 500 comments. Many users expressed dismay that the company behind the pandemic-era video conferencing staple now claims rights to their private conversations for AI development.

“Thankfully nothing like this is in Jitsi Meet’s TOS,” wrote one commenter, though others quickly noted that Jitsi’s terms contain similar language, albeit less explicit about AI training. The debate highlighted the broader tension: every major video conferencing service requires some license to operate, but Zoom’s broad license language — without offering users a choice — has reignited discussions about data ownership in an era of increasingly hungry AI systems.