Dear @reeflings, I hereby propose to leave behind the Zoom platform.
Here’s why: as of July 27th, they changed their terms and conditions. Section 10.2 and 10.4 now say that users need to give Zoom a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free license to use recordings of calls for basically any use, including “training and tuning of AI algorithms and models”. There is no way to opt out. This is likely to raise privacy concerns, as well as more general concerns about the overall societal effects of this type of AI models: for one, they are likely to make deep fakes much easier. This is before you even start to consider the environmental implications of the AI economy and the data economy in general (water consumption and CO2 emissions of data centers, etc.). Here is a short article that is making the rounds in my space. Personally, I am getting very uneasy about my unwilling participation in the war for AI dominance between companies (and states). I would welcome some more reflection about AI’s contribution to human well-being, and on what governance structures should be put in place.
Failing that, we can just boycott Zoom. I know @manuelpueyo had already attempted to find reliable open source solutions. For now, corporate solutions are superior, but hopefully this will start to change as more people, like me, feel just too creeped out by these corporations gung ho approach to privacy and data protection. Can you all live with @reef-it looking into non-evil solutions for our meetings?
Even more outrageous is the fact that as a (big) company you can agree different terms with Zoom. So it is the rest of us that are serving as a living testlab/testbed for Zoom and others playing with AI and LLMs (large language models)….
The problem with Jitsi so far has been the bad quality connection. I think it’s not so much the software per se, but the combination between software and server. Companies like Zoom have muscle, and they probably do a lot of optimizing. But yes, if it’s easy for you go ahead and test. A solution we have not tried yet is Big Blue Button, I believe that is also open source.
Great idea and I’m all for it. Finding a reliable alternative is not a trivial detail. I cannot count the number of Reef meetings in which we lost close to half an hour because Jitsi was glitching, but maybe this will be better if we put it on Mark’s server?
thank you for spotting this out. i am 100% with you. this is the post on on availiable jitsi servers. @Marc_O your idea of self hosting us sounds great. it really works, but it’s not an easy install (i warn you
