This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts -- 404Media

[erronis]

https://www.404media.co/this-company-is-secretly-turning-your-zoom-calls-into-ai-podcasts/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

WebinarTV hosts 200,000 “webinars.” A Zoom call you may thought was private might be one of them.

Of course this is happening...

WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as "a search engine for the best webinars," is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit. In some cases, people only found out that their Zoom calls were recorded once WebinarTV reached out to them directly to say their call was turned into a podcast in an attempt to promote WebinarTV's services.

WebinarTV claims to host more than 200,000 webinars. It's not clear how it's recording so many Zoom calls without permission, but in some cases the stolen videos posted to WebinarTV can put call participants at risk.

Tom Rademacher, a teacher and editor, told me he organized a Zoom call for educators and education advocates in the months after Donald Trump was elected to discuss keeping kids safe from ICE.

"I very intentionally did not record the webinar since we'd be talking politics and there were some local electeds and district leaders that were on," Rademacher told me. "There were definitely people on there who it would have been bad politically and professionally to be, especially at the time, linked to being anti-Trump in an education space."

. . .

[FakeNoose]

1. Lawsuits! I doubt their liability insurance would cover this obvious theft

[Sweet Rosie Red]

2. How do you prevent this?

From the article:
“...CyberAlberta, an organization dedicated to improving cybersecurity in the Canadian province, published a report about WebinarTV when it noticed that it was stealing its Zoom calls.
“CyberAlberta’s investigation found that WebinarTV primarily gains initial access to Zoom webinars via third-party browser extensions. These extensions can access webinar links when a user either inadvertently grants calendar permissions—exposing meeting invitations—or willfully submits meeting details into the WebinarTV platform,” the report said. “WebinarTV is believed to leverage a range of browser extensions that provide functionalities such as AI powered transcription and note-taking tools, or tools to automate the joining of online meetings. The platform mostly relies on the widespread use of these tools by end users, rather than operating them directly. However, at least one of the known extensions is listed on the Chrome Web Store as developed by WebinarTV.”…..The Zoom spokesperson said that users who want to keep their calls private should avoid publicly posting meeting links when possible, require registration and manually approve registrants to carefully vet participants, and enable available deterrence features such as watermarking….”

We need more information to protect ourselves and much stronger privacy laws!! Be careful out there, folks!

[hlthe2b]

3. Well, most that I participate in are professional so they do all that (registration, vetting, etc.) but

the most important aspect for THEM to protect content is that they offer approved continuing education (unit) certificates and CEUs are required for licensure renewal for physicians, veterinarians, dentists, and some other professionals/paraprofessionals. Getting that CE is an expensive proposition unless you are able to travel to attend a lot of professional conferences at employer expense--which is increasingly drying up, so drug companies are increasingly sponsoring these webinars.

But, the average zoom call is going to have a hard time fighting this AI theft crap.

[bucolic_frolic]

4. Time to mask up like ICE just to attend a Webinar