Zoom has also made changes to its privacy policy with the new changes. It’s important to note that ads will appear only for calls/meetings hosted by other Basic users. The developer clarified that it wouldn’t access user content for third-party advertising, marketing, or other promotions. However, Zoom’s advertising partners can still use cookies to track user activity on the website. This can be disabled via the service’s cookie management tool. “We are incredibly proud to provide a service that helps so many people around the world stay connected. This change ensures that our free Basic users are able to continue connecting with friends, family, and colleagues with the same robust platform we have always offered,” Chief Marketing Officer, Janine Pelosi said in a blog post (via).
Zoom recently brought auto-generated captions to users of its free tier
Unlike many other services, Zoom offers a fairly attractive free tier for users. However, free users miss out on features like cloud storage for recordings of your meetings. Moreover, free users can only participate in group meetings for 40 minutes and individual calls for 30 minutes. The inclusion of ads is barely surprising given that it will allow Zoom to keep the free tier going. It’s also noteworthy that ads currently won’t be intrusive as it only appears after the conclusion of a meeting/call. However, this could change in the future. Despite the presence of several video/audio conferencing apps, Zoom has managed to stay afloat. The service shot into prominence during the pandemic as people began working remotely. Since then, the company has included multiple new features. Zoom recently brought auto-generated captions to free users, a feature that was initially exclusive to paid subscribers. But it’s still early days for this captioning feature as it only supports English at the moment. “It’s important to us that everyone can successfully connect, communicate, and participate using Zoom,” Product Marketing Manager, Meetings & Chat at Zoom, Theresa Larkin said at the time.
