John Mark Ockerbloom
Joseph CoxThis is wild: a company is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for $$$. Some meeting participants only found out after we told them. Included meeting on protecting kids from ICE, was supposed to be private https://www.404media.co/this-company-is-secretly-turning-your-zoom-calls-into-ai-podcasts/
Michael Gemar@josephcox This happened to our organization. Some sternly-worded emails seemed to resolve it, but it's an asinine thing to do.
Michael@josephcox It's like all those scammy companies grabbing every PDF around and rehosting it, but in even worse
KewlCat@mschfr @josephcox replace "PDF" with "content" and you've got yourself a nice definition of every AI company 😁
@KewlCat @josephcox I'm pretty sure that there are companies around that are taking other websites, run them through a LLM rewrite and then try to get those ad dollars
Em 
@josephcox @brucelawson This is infringing so many privacy laws...
Dimitris Nakos, MSc@Em0nM4stodon @josephcox @brucelawson
I'm.... I am really out of words...
Gabriel N@wtrmt @josephcox @brucelawson Most privacy laws require to place an official complaint for enforcement at the individual level.
Anyone who had their data collected by a third-party like this without prior notification and consent, and has a local privacy law protecting against this, can likely place a complaint. It's often very easy to do.
Here's a short guide I wrote to help with this: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/activism/toolbox/tip-report-privacy-violations/
Cullen Thomas@josephcox the weirdest thing about this is that there is, for sure!, an audience for these podcasts somewhere out there.
Someone is devouring the recordings of your meetings that should have been emails, at 3 A.M., while staring directly into the void.
Deborah Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦@josephcox @Em0nM4stodon yep. It happened to an ICF coaching colleague.
Basically, extortion: "we have copied your content and have monetised it. Pay us if you want us to tell people it's yours." Or some such. 😡
Basically, extortion: "we have copied your content and have monetised it. Pay us if you want us to tell people it's yours." Or some such. 😡
Epic Null@josephcox Literallg the only shield they have against how blatantly illegal this is is the "AI" layer.
LM Little@josephcox This is sick. Zoom subscribers need to speak out to encourage legal action.
Gabriele Svelto@josephcox everything that has to do with AI is basically banditism in a suit
tanavitSo, anybody can spy on a Zoom meeting, even private ?
iam-py-test@tanavit private meetings aren't impacted
All the people I talked to who found their Zoom meetings on WebinarTV did not use strict privacy settings, and shared links to the meeting because they invited a large number of people to attend.
Thanks.
Charles A-M@iampytest1 @tanavit I'm not so sure.
The article links to this CyberAlberta report, which suggests that some Zoom links are obtained through browser extensions related to calendar and AI transcription. It implies that the recording is made by an agent that attends the Zoom call separately, but I don't see it ruled out that the recording could be made by a compromised extension by a legitimate attendee (it doesn't use Zoom's meeting recording tools).
https://cyberalberta.ca/zooming-out-webinartvs-rampant-scraping-of-online-meetings
NilaJones
@ppatel wow what a shitshow. I had them send me emails, but I actually thought it was a Zoom Ai running wild, as I had used it to summarise the webinar as an experiment. Didn't realise it was a 3rd party software. @josephcox
Pratik Patel@jakobrosin @josephcox I've gotten couple of email from them. I've ignored them. I didn't realize how bad it was until this article.
@ppatel exactly. Granted, all of those vebinars have been public and also recorded and published later by us as well, but that under our control, branding and accessibility @josephcox
Curtis Wilcox@ppatel
Zoom has a reCAPTCHA v3 based option that can be enabled to help protect against this sort of thing. I don't know how effective it is in practice against WebinarTV.
HisVirusness@josephcox You would think something like this would be super illegal.
June Blender@josephcox Without the consent of people in the meeting? (I'd include that in the headline.)
Un Bourguignon
Francis Mangion (M)