Zoom agrees on security and privacy measures with NY Attorney General

13. May 2020

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom has seen an exponential surge in new users over the past two months. As we have mentioned in a previous blog post, this increase in activity highlighted a range of different issues and concerns both on the security and on the privacy side of the teleconference platform.

In light of these issues, which induced a wave of caution around the use of Zoom by a lot of companies, schools, religious institutions and governmental departments, urging to stop the use of the platform, Zoom has agreed to enhance security measures and privacy standards.

In the Agreement struck on May 7th with the New York Attorney General Laetitia James, Zoom has come to terms over several new measures it will enforce over the course of the next weeks. However, most of these enhancements have already been planned in the CEO Yang’s “90-day plan” published on April 1st, and have been slowly put into effect.

These measures include:

  • a new data security program,
  • conduction of risk assessment reviews,
  • enhancement of encryption protocols,
  • a default password for every meeting,
  • halt to sharing user data with Facebook.

In response to the Agreement being struck, Attorney General James stated: “Our lives have inexorably changed over the past two months, and while Zoom has provided an invaluable service, it unacceptably did so without critical security protections. This agreement puts protections in place so that Zoom users have control over their privacy and security, and so that workplaces, schools, religious institutions, and consumers don’t have to worry while participating in a video call.“

A day prior, Zoom was also reinstated for the use of online classes by the New York City Department of Education. In order to ensure the privacy of the students and counteract “Zoombombing”, Zoom has agreed to enhanced privacy controls for free accounts, as well as kindergarten through 12th grade education accounts. Hosts, even those with free accounts, will, by default, be able to control access to their video conferences by requiring a password or the placement of users in a digital waiting room before a meeting can be accessed.

This is not the only new addition to the controls that hosts will be able to access: they will also be able to control access to private messages in a Zoom chat, control access to email domains in a Zoom directory, decide who can share screens, and more.

Overall, Zoom stated that it was happy to have been able to reach a resolution with the Attorney General quickly. It remains to see how the measures in is implementing will hold up to the still growing audience, and how fast they can be implemented for worldwide use.