The Video-conference service Zoom and its Data Security issues

Amidst the Corona crisis, the video communications service Zoom gained enormous popularity. The rate of daily Zoom users skyrocketed from 10 Mio in December 2019 to 200 Mio in March 2020. As it outshined many of its competitors, Zoom labels itself as “the leader in modern enterprise video communications”. However, the company has been facing a lot of public criticism because of its weaknesses in data security and lack of awareness in data protection matters.

Basic data security weaknesses unfolded little by little starting in March 2020:

• Zoom had to admit that it was wrongly advertising to provide full end-to-end encryption for all shared contents like video, audio or screen sharing.
• Security experts revealed several bugs that could have allowed webcam and mic hijacking and the theft of login credentials.
• An online Tech Magazine reported that Zoom leaked thousands of their users’ email addresses and photos to strangers.
• Video-conferences which users did not protect with a password, enabled “Zoombombing”, a phenomenon in which strangers hijacked videocalls and disrupted them by posting pornographic and racist images as well as spamming the conversations with threatening language. In response, Zoom introduced the Waiting Room feature and additional password settings.

At the same time, Zoom’s data privacy practices came under scrutiny:

• Zoom shared web analytics data with third-party companies for advertising purposes without having a legal basis or notifying users about this practice. In response to criticism, Zoom revised its privacy policy and now declares that it does not share data from meetings for advertising.
• The company also shared more analytics data of its users with Facebook than stated on Zoom’s privacy policy, even if the user did not sign in with their Facebook account. Zoom introduced an update in which this sharing is terminated.
• The New York Times revealed that Zoom used a data mining feature that matched Zoom users’ names and email addresses to their LinkedIn profiles without the users knowing about it. Zoom then enabled automatic sharing of the matched LinkedIn profiles with other meeting members that were subscribers of a LinkedIn service for sales prospecting (“LinkedIn Sales Navigator”). In response to criticism, Zoom removed this feature permanently.
• Zoom hosted a feature called Attention Tracking, which let the meeting’s host know when an attendee had clicked away the meeting window for more than 30 seconds. In the meantime, Zoom disabled the feature.

The security and privacy issues of Zoom have led various public authorities and companies internationally to ban their workers from using the service.

On 1 April 2020, Zoom’s founder and CEO Eric S. Yuan announced a 90-day plan to significantly improve their data security in an effort to build greater trust with their users. This plan includes freezing the introduction of new features, enlarge their cybersecurity team and engage outside help from security advisors.