WebinarTV’s Rampant Scraping of Online Meetings

dw861 writes:

As recently reported by CyberAlberta:

A webinar hosting platform known as WebinarTV is actively scraping and redistributing both public and private Zoom webinars without knowledge or consent of organizers. Initial access is typically gained through third-party browser extensions such as AI-powered transcription or auto-join tools. These extensions are inadvertently provided calendar permissions by their users and, in some cases, users are willfully submitting meeting details to the WebinarTV platform without the knowledge or consent of the organizers.

There have been many reports on social media as well as online review boards indicating hidden scraping of not just publicly advertised webinars, but supposedly private meetings as well. Many organizers reported first learning that their webinars had been made publicly available through a notification email from WebinarTV themselves.

Once these tools join a meeting-either with or on behalf of a user-the session content is captured and subsequently published on WebinarTV.us. By analysing previews of uploaded webinars, CyberAlberta validated claims made by online users that WebinarTV uses screen capture to scrape content, rather than using Zoom's built-in "Record" function. The available previews display screenshots consistent with a screen-captured view, rather than the format produced by a native Zoom recording.

WebinarTV appears to operate a business model centered around a promotional service called "Lead Advantage", which it offers for a fee. The platform scrapes webinars en masse and positions itself as a facilitator to help these webinars reach a broader audience, which in the case of private webinars is the opposite intention. According to WebinarTV's FAQs, Lead Advantage enables "hosts" (a term it uses to refer to individuals whose content has been scraped) to "promote their webinars through web placements, email distribution, and higher prominence directory listings". The service encourages these hosts to bid for increased exposure, with bidding starting at USD $20.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.