Zoom has adjusted its privacy conditions and will take various measures for all EU users following a Dutch investigation. For example, Zoom will disable the AI assistant by default for Europeans and will no longer send commercial messages to users.
Zoom is adjusting its privacy policy for all users in the European Economic Area, writes educational umbrella organization SURF. In 2022, it had a data privacy impact assessment carried out into the use of Zoom in Dutch education. It then became apparent that Zoom had resolved several risks in its software. The most important of these was that Zoom would only store data from European users in European data centers. Those measures had already been implemented, but there were still some small risks left in the software. Zoom has now also solved the latter.
Many of these small risks revolve around the privacy policy and processing agreements, writes Privacy Company, which conducted the privacy research on behalf of SURF. Among other things, Zoom has described more clearly what it collects and for what purpose. In addition, the data retention period has been reduced to 7 to 31 days after account termination. Zoom is also releasing a tool that allows administrators to handle user deletion requests and the company will 'no longer send unsolicited commercial messages to account information of administrators and end users'.
Zoom will release a tool in the first half of this year tool that allows administrators to view telemetry data. In the second half of the year, the company will launch a tool with which end users can request their own data.
With the new measures, Zoom fully complies with European privacy rules. This means Zoom can definitely be used in Dutch education, writes Privacy Company. “If Dutch educational and research institutions apply the recommended measures, there will no longer be any known data protection risks to data protection for the individual users of the Zoom videoconferencing services.”