Image source: Zoom
Security experts, privacy advocates and others have lambasted its security and privacy shortcomings. Zoom has been called a work-from-home privacy disaster waiting to happen. Security experts have urged Zoom to clean up its privacy act. The FBI issued a warning about using it. Some companies and government agencies dropped the tool. The company has been sued for selling user data, an allegation it denies.
Probably the worse PR disaster is the “Zoombombing” phenomenon. Hackers break into online meetings and shout racist slurs or broadcast pornography or other shocking videos.
A PR Counter-Offensive
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan sought to quell the negative reactions in a blog post. He apologized for the problems, listed what the company has done so far, and stated how it intends to resolve the problems.
First he gave reasons for the problems. Zoom was built for large organization with strong IT support, not for students or people working from home. Its daily meeting participants ballooned from 10 million in December to 200 million in March. The sudden growth revealed unforeseen issues.
“For the past several weeks, supporting this influx of users has been a tremendous undertaking and our sole focus,” Yuan wrote in the blog post. “However, we recognize that we have fallen short of the community’s — and our own — privacy and security expectations. For that, I am deeply sorry.”
Zooms in on Problem Solving
Zoom will enact a 90-day freeze on adding new features while it resolves privacy and security issues, Yuan said. It will complete “a comprehensive review” with third-party experts and representative users.
Yuan noted that in the company has already taken a number of actions, such as fixing security issues and publishing tutorials and help videos. The company posted a guide that helps users counter harassment on the platform, or Zoombombing, by clarifying the use of protective features, waiting rooms, passwords, muting controls, and limiting screen sharing. It also removed the Facebook SDK in its iOS client and reconfigured it to prevent it from collecting unnecessary information.
Zoom is popular because of its openness and ease-of-use. But those factors also invite hackers. Its default settings don’t encourage passwords for meetings and allow any participant to share their screen. Zoom changed default settings for education accounts. At least currently, others still need to change their settings. Putting the onus on users to change default settings may fail to stop Zoombombing hacks and resulting PR problems.
“Zoom may well be forced to tighten up the very parts of its app that make it so appealing for consumers and businesses alike in the coming months,” points out Senior Editor Tom Wrren at The Verge. “The company now faces some tough decisions on how to better balance its default settings, user privacy, and ultimately its ease of use.”
In the meantime, all users must attend to their privacy settings to keep zoom meetings private and reduce odds of zoombombing.
Bottom Line: Zoom has its hand full with welcoming new users and revising its video conferencing tool. It also has its hands full with communicating its technology fixes to the media and public.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
