When working on its budget for 2020, I am sure CEO Eric Yuan never thought there would be an upsurge in the use of Zoom as it is experiencing right now with the lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.
According to Yuan in a recent blog post, “Usage of Zoom has ballooned overnight – far surpassing what we expected when we first announced our desire to help in late February. This includes over 90,000 schools across 20 countries that have taken us up on our offer to help children continue their education remotely. To put this growth in context, as of the end of December last year, the maximum number of daily meeting participants, both free and paid, conducted on Zoom was approximately 10 million. In March this year, we reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants, both free and paid.”
While the service has experienced this geometric growth, some privacy and security issues with various aspects of the software have emerged. It has been widely criticized for this lately, from for terrible security, misleading dark patterns, fake end-to-end-encryption claims to having an incomplete privacy policy .
It was such a source of concern that even Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX banned its employees from using video conferencing app Zoom, citing “significant privacy and security concerns. NASA, one of SpaceX’s biggest customers, also prohibits its employees from using Zoom.
This is why Eric Yuan has responded in a blog post, saying that he is sorry. “For the past several weeks, supporting this influx of users has been a tremendous undertaking and our sole focus. We have strived to provide you with uninterrupted service and the same user-friendly experience that has made Zoom the video-conferencing platform of choice for enterprises around the world, while also ensuring platform safety, privacy, and security. 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, and I want to share what we are doing about it.’ he says.
Here are some of the things the company has done to address some of the issues:
- Zoom has been offering proper training, tools, and support to help its users understand their own account features and how best to use the platform
- It has worked hard to actively and quickly address specific issues and questions that have been raised.
- it took action to remove the Facebook SDK in our iOS client and have reconfigured it to prevent it from collecting unnecessary device information from our users
- it updated its privacy policy to be more clear and transparent around what data we collect and how it is used.
More importantly, the company says that it is enacting a feature freeze, effectively immediately, and over the next 90 days, it will be shifting all its engineering resources to focus on the biggest trust, safety, and privacy issues.
It will also be conducting a comprehensive review with third-party experts and representative users to understand and ensure the security of all of its new consumer use cases.
It will also be preparing a transparency report that details information related to requests for data, records, or content and enhancing its current bug bounty program.
