I recently wrote a roundup on the current state of video conferencing software and one of my comments about Zoom was that it has a history of abusing privacy and not taking security seriously. It looks like my concerns were well founded this week.

  1. According to The Washington Post, your Zoom videos are visible by anyone on the Internet
  2. Security expert Bruce Schneier explains how Zoom not only captures and stores personal data about you, it "secretly displayed data from people's LinkedIn profiles, which allowed some meeting participants to snoop on each other". He also explains how Zoom's encryption is paper thin which becomes even more important because of the next item
  3. Researchers at the University of Toronto documented how Zoom calls often get routed through servers in China.
Every single one of these items is cause for concern on its own, but taken together should really give pause to anyone using Zoom, especially when there are so many other good choices out there.