AI Is Watching... Make Sure You're Prepared

Video-conferencing platform Zoom Video Communications (ZM) just gave us another reminder to always read the terms of service... The story begins back in March, when Zoom launched its new generative artificial intelligence ("AI") smart companion, Zoom IQ. Zoom IQ can do it all, including: Identifying "key moments" in meetings Drafting meeting summaries Answering meeting queries […] Not rendering correctly? View this e-mail as a web page [here](. [Empire Financial Daily] AI Is Watching... Make Sure You're Prepared By Kyle Wehrle --------------------------------------------------------------- [Top Journalist Exposes Fed's Dark Secret]( "America's finest business journalist" just blew the cover on a dark Fed secret that could impact everything you know about earning, saving, and investing cash. [See here to find out what he found...]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Video-conferencing platform Zoom Video Communications (ZM) just gave us another reminder to always read the terms of service... The story begins back in March, when Zoom launched its new generative artificial intelligence ("AI") smart companion, Zoom IQ. Zoom IQ can do it all, including: - Identifying "key moments" in meetings - Drafting meeting summaries - Answering meeting queries from attendees - Performing recording playback Zoom IQ can even give breakdowns of who spoke the most during certain points of a meeting and who expressed the most interest, down to percentages. It also generates "visual breakdowns" of the subject matter covered by a meeting's speakers. The other task that Zoom IQ is good at? Spying on us... See, when Zoom launched Zoom IQ, the company quietly altered its terms of service so that Zoom IQ users were more or less signing away all their "Customer Content" for AI training. These terms included "consent to Zoom's access, use, collection, creation, modification, distribution, processing, sharing, maintenance, and storage" of Zoom IQ user data for "any purpose" like "machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for the purposes of training and tuning of algorithms and models)." For added context, AI "training" (aka, machine learning) is when datasets are fed to learning machines. AI scans those datasets to "learn" and deliver better results. And in the case of Zoom IQ, the datasets being scanned by the AI were everything from confidential business meetings to psychiatric appointments, calls from loved ones, and other highly intimate interactions. Audio... facial recognition... you name it. --------------------------------------------------------------- Recommended Link: [Wall Street legend: Fifth mega-rally ahead for this asset]( A Wall Street legend is warning that a rare mega-rally could send a surprise asset soaring. This has happened only four other times over the last 123 years. Find out why this legendary analyst says it could happen again, with the potential for 10x returns if you get in on this early. [Get more details when you click this link](. --------------------------------------------------------------- Naturally, folks were up in arms this month after taking notice of Zoom IQ's aggressive new privacy terms... Zoom responded quickly on its site's blog to do damage control. As the company stated in a post... Following feedback received regarding Zoom's recently updated terms of service Zoom has updated our terms of service and the below blog post to make it clear that Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom's or third-party artificial intelligence models. It's not the most reassuring promise coming from a company with a []history of privacy concerns. According to a Vox article back in April 2020... Leading up to the pandemic, Zoom suffered from several security issues, including a well-publicized vulnerability that could force Mac users that have (or ever had) Zoom installed on their device to join Zoom meetings with their cameras automatically activated. In January, cybersecurity firm Check Point found a way that a hacker could easily generate active meeting ID numbers, which they could then use to join meetings if the meetings weren't password protected. Zoom instituted a number of changes to help fix the issue, but Check Point's recommendation that meetings must be password protected was not. Among other issues, the article also noted concerns over what Zoom was doing with data from iOS devices... Another recent dustup followed a Vice report last week that Zoom's iOS app sends data back to Facebook through a software development kit, or SDK. (SDKs are packages of tools that developers use to build apps, and it's very common for apps to have third-party SDKs that transmit information back to those third parties.) Facebook's SDKs are some of the most popular in the world, mobile app intelligence service Apptopia told Recode, with at least a million apps using its most popular social SDK and at least half a million apps using its login SDK. The login SDK enables users to log in to Zoom through their Facebook accounts, and in Zoom's case, it also sent basic device information back to Facebook, including the device's model, app version, and cellphone service carrier. Some online privacy experts believe Zoom IQ's new terms are toeing the line, but others remain wary of their vague wording and confusing nature... For example, if a company executive has consented to Zoom IQ's AI-training terms and they create a mandatory Zoom IQ meeting, that theoretically means the other mandatory attendees will be forced to give Zoom IQ their personal "content" without giving their true consent, as their job is on the line. There's a lot of gray space for Zoom to operate in here, which rightfully worries people. The fact of the matter is that the AI race is on, and human-generated content is the elixir that powers AI innovation. The more genuine human content for a company's AI to learn from, the greater the chances its AI will accurately learn and become more nuanced. For this reason alone, it's likely that Zoom IQ will continue collecting user content that falls through the many cracks in the law concerning AI. But when it comes to AI, Zoom's privacy concerns run deeper than its own nosy algorithms... In related news, a recent U.K.-based report has made the claim that AI can decode Zoom attendee's keystrokes with 93% accuracy using just audio. In the study, the team of researchers pressed 36 keys on a MacBook Pro a total of 25 times each while recording the audio on two test devices: Zoom audio and an iPhone's microphone. They then fed their AI the audio of the keystrokes. The AI took it from there... and when tested, it was 93% accurate predicting Zoom keystrokes and 95% accurate predicting iPhone keystrokes. The cybersecurity risks here can't be understated, with the most obvious being password security... What good are text-based passwords if an AI can quickly decode them? Fortunately, AI has a weakness when it comes to deciphering passwords from audio: the shift button. For whatever reason, AI has struggled to predict when users hit the shift button... so be sure to include capital letters in your passwords for added security. Additionally, most cybersecurity experts recommend that you use two-step authenticators like fingerprint scans and facial recognition, which remain difficult to trick. Whatever you do, just be aware that AI is increasingly watching you – whether you're in a car going down the highway, in a business meeting, or even face-to-face with family and friends. Regards, Kyle Wehrle August 17, 2023 --------------------------------------------------------------- If someone forwarded you this e-mail and you would like to be added to the Empire Financial Daily e-mail list to receive e-mails like this every weekday, simply [sign up here](. © 2023 Empire Financial Research. All rights reserved. Any reproduction, copying, or redistribution, in whole or in part, is prohibited without written permission from Empire Financial Research, 1125 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21201 [www.empirefinancialresearch.com.]( You received this e-mail because you are subscribed to Empire Financial Daily. [Unsubscribe from all future e-mails](