quote:

Acouple of months ago, Zoom was a dull, if successful, videoconferencing app that not many people knew about. Now, it is a household name and an integral part of many of our quarantined lives. We conduct business meetings on it; we chat to our mates on it; some people even have sex parties on it.

Yet there are growing concerns over what it does with users’ data. You may think you are working from the privacy of your own home, but the software is probably sharing a lot more information about you than you realise. Zoom has an attention-tracking feature, for example, which notifies the host of some video calls if participants click away to look at something else. The company has actively promoted this feature to educators, explaining it’s a good way to monitor which of your students is slacking off.

In any article about privacy violations, it is pretty much a given that Facebook will be mentioned. This is no exception. Recent analysis by Vice found that Zoom’s iOS app was sending analytics data to Facebook, even when the user did not have a Facebook account and even though this was not addressed in Zoom’s privacy policy. This data included things such as the user’s location and the device’s advertiser identifier information, a unique ID that lets companies send you targeted ads. On Friday, Zoom issued a statement saying “whoops!’” and announcing it had updated its software to stop sending iOS data to Facebook.

quote:

Originally posted by wtg:

quote:

Acouple of months ago, Zoom was a dull, if successful, videoconferencing app that not many people knew about. Now, it is a household name and an integral part of many of our quarantined lives. We conduct business meetings on it; we chat to our mates on it; some people even have sex parties on it..

quote:

some people even have sex parties on it.

quote:

Some school districts around the country have started to ban the use of Zoom for online learning from home during the coronavirus crisis because of growing concerns about security, and others are reassessing how and whether to use the teleconferencing platform.

Days after the FBI issued a warning to the public about the “hijacking” of online classrooms and teleconferences, the New York City Department of Education, which runs the largest school district in the country, said teachers should no longer use Zoom and should instead work through Microsoft Teams.

Other school districts, too, have banned Zoom or are trying to beef up security around its use. Clark County Public Schools in Nevada said in a statement that it had decided to “disable access to Zoom out of an abundance of caution due to instances of hacking that created unsafe environments for teachers and students,” but that it was looking at options to that might allow it to resume access.

quote:

the “hijacking” of online classrooms and teleconferences, in my opinion, is mostly due to people not using Zoom in the right ("secure") way.