Company that Secretly Records and Publishes Zoom Meetings
WebinarTV searches the internet for public Zoom invites, joins the meetings, secretly records them, and publishes (alternate link) the recordings. It doesn’t use the Zoom record feature, so Zoom can’t do anything about it.
This to me seems similar to what Internet Archive and Archive.today do, with the distinction that the latter services create a saved copy of webpages that users of said services pick (and don’t search for the content to be archived). Neither of these services ask for permission to create a copy otherwise publicly available content. And Internet Archive and Archive.today don’t make it a business model to profit from the webpage archival activity.
“secretly records them”
Any participant can “secretly” record the call and this has not been criticized by the media before a company automated it and started to do it in bulk. The “problem” was always there. Maybe people should start thinking about what “public” means, including online video calls. Just because it’s “streaming” (and not a permanent, downloadable video file), it is still public to anybody. If the call is confidential, maybe set it as private and send out invites to the participants. Just because it takes more work (to put together the invite list, etc.), it’s still a must for sensitive content/information.
The real difference seems to be that WebinarTV also makes (or saves) the text transcript of the call and feeds it into AI to create summaries, etc. Of course Zoom could/might do this as well (MS Teams does it).
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Zsolt • April 3, 2026 8:03 AM
This to me seems similar to what Internet Archive and Archive.today do, with the distinction that the latter services create a saved copy of webpages that users of said services pick (and don’t search for the content to be archived). Neither of these services ask for permission to create a copy otherwise publicly available content. And Internet Archive and Archive.today don’t make it a business model to profit from the webpage archival activity.
“secretly records them”
Any participant can “secretly” record the call and this has not been criticized by the media before a company automated it and started to do it in bulk. The “problem” was always there. Maybe people should start thinking about what “public” means, including online video calls. Just because it’s “streaming” (and not a permanent, downloadable video file), it is still public to anybody. If the call is confidential, maybe set it as private and send out invites to the participants. Just because it takes more work (to put together the invite list, etc.), it’s still a must for sensitive content/information.
The real difference seems to be that WebinarTV also makes (or saves) the text transcript of the call and feeds it into AI to create summaries, etc. Of course Zoom could/might do this as well (MS Teams does it).