Zooming In On Zoom Reveals Disturbing Details
Well, it didn’t take long for another round of headlines to pop up exposing Zoom for a host of newly discovered privacy and security problems. Indeed, the closer you look, the worse they appear: these new issues were discovered so quickly once people started looking into Zoom that it leads one to believe that their leadership is not only unconcerned with actually making their platform private and secure, but that they’re either too stupid or too apathetic to even hide the evidence when they cut corners.
The most recent news:
The Washington Post reported yesterday that Zoom calls are susceptible to eavesdropping by virtually anyone in the Internet, having verified that they were able to spy on business meetings, school children during classes, personal therapy sessions, and others types of calls.
The Citizen Lab reported yesterday that some Zoom calls were being routed through servers located in China, and so were the encryption keys for those calls. This is a problem because the Chinese government is operating a surveillance state, and could force Zoom to hand over any data stored within Chinese borders, encryption keys included. So not only does Zoom itself have the ability to snoop on your calls, but so does the Chinese government. They claimed this was an accident spurred by increased strain on domestic servers that resulted in calls being handed off to overflow servers in China. Okay.
Additionally, The Citizen Lab uncovered that Zoom was actually using a significantly weaker type of encryption than they told users, opting for AES-128 encryption instead of AES-256 encryption they advertised.
Before you blindly trust Zoom’s Chinese CEO Eric Yuan, note that The Citizen Lab also reported that Zoom has over 700 employees in China and operates three subsidiary companies there. But it was totally an accident that they tossed the Chinese government their encryption keyring. Sure.
Just what you like to hear when you’re relying on Zoom to connect with others in the age of social distancing. Again, if your organization uses Zoom, I implore you to pressure them to find an alternative.
Wisely, some organizations, including the New York City Department of Education, are now banning the use of Zoom. Hopefully other institutions will follow their lead.