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@Zsolt the big difference is in the skill levels. If you’re tech savvy enough to set up a webpage, you’re presumably tech savvy enough to understand that it’s public. Wheras lots of regular joes and even tech-incompetents are forced to use Zoom for their everyday lives, and making a zoom meeting “public” is as simple as forgetting to check a box you may or may not know exists.
Michael Robertson • April 3, 2026 3:34 PM
This article is inaccurate. WebinarTV.us only records free and public WEBINARS, not meetings.
Webinars have titles and descriptions and no passwords. They are open to everyone – no different than a web page open to everyone.
Also every host is sent 2 emails telling them their webinar is being added to the search engine, so it is the opposite of “secret”. A host can remove their webinar with one click if they don’t want to be listed.
nitpicker • April 3, 2026 5:29 PM
@Michael Robertson
webinar n a seminar conducted over the internet [OED]
seminar n a conference or other meeting for discussion or training;
a class at university … [OED]
Zoom tout their product for “video conferencing.”
So we’re back to the discussion we had in times of Covid:
how to keep Zoom calls non-public.
Fast and loose cooks the goose • April 4, 2026 12:53 PM
@Tout le monde
This reminds me of something I saw in a doc on the late Karen Silkwood (G- rest her soul).
A retired officer said it was his practice to avoid having to get a “court papers” for a wiretap if he could rely on a rule which allowed one of the parties to a telephone call to consent to its recording.
I suppose in this way the consenting party became a sort of informant.
I have no idea if this interpretation is legally sound, but it is creepy.
Bring back in-person meetings.
Rontea • April 5, 2026 10:57 AM
By normalizing this type of behavior, we continue to erode the social expectation of privacy. Users reasonably assume that a Zoom link isn’t an open invitation for third parties to record and republish their conversations. In practice, this is the digital equivalent of leaving your front door unlocked and having someone walk in to livestream your dinner party—technically possible, ethically dubious.
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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
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).