Your “Private” Zoom Call Could Easily Become a Public Webinar

​404 Media just uncovered something that should unsettle anyone who uses Zoom: An AI-powered site called WebinarTV is using third-party apps to access online meetings and record them, with meeting presenters repackaged and marketed as “experts” in public-facing webinars.
 
If they're lucky, these unwitting experts – who gain nothing from their newfound notoriety and, indeed, rightly thought they were mere participants in an invited Zoom call – might receive an AI-generated email from an AI-generated agent at AI-based WebinarTV announcing the surprise “rebranding” of their Zoom meeting participation, and perhaps providing the means to opt out. All of this, of course, is after the fact, so it's a privacy-last approach (not to mention that such notifications are probably being routed to spam).
 
For privacy-first users, it's yet another lesson in the ever-growing lecture titled “Pay Attention to Those Settings!” To wit, when informed by 404, Zoom did a review and found that WebinarTV is accessing meeting links that have been publicly shared. That’s the key weakness: Various browser extensions and other digital tools make it possible to record and edit such publicly accessible meetings – even if the meetings themselves aren't being recorded.
 
Using third-party tools (and perhaps their own) WebinarTV is capturing a meeting's audio and video in real time. “Third-party screen recording” is how a Zoom spokesperson described it to 404, while also suggesting that the company was technically powerless to stop it.
 
So it’s up to us for the time being. Consider taking the following steps to avoid getting “webinarred” (or “Zoomjacked”?):
 

1. Review the privacy settings for your Zoom meetings and be as strict as your situation allows. Yes, it’s mildly inconvenient, but the price of convenience in the digital age is rarely worth it.
   
   
2. Publicly posting meeting links (or sharing those links indiscriminately) is asking for trouble. You can still invite a large number of people to your Zoom call, but work with your tech advisors to make joining the soiree a matter of jumping through some simple, common-sense privacy hoops (like manually admitting attendees – a perfect job for work/study interns, by the way).
   
   
3. Require meeting attendees to register – and why wouldn’t you want to do that, anyway?
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4. Display a watermark to indicate copyrighted or private content. Tell WebinarTV and its ilk: “We’re on to you and we’re not going to make this easy.”

 
The CEO of WebinarTV told 404 that because the meeting links were publicly accessible, attendees shouldn't have any expectation of privacy. Hence, his company is justified in its actions and isn't guilty of any violations.

Our recommendation? See items 1 through 4 above and don't give WebinarTV the satisfaction. In the meantime, and at this rate, caveat emptor.
 
If you want a deeper dive into WebinarTV’s shenanigans, CyberAlberta details the steps.