Josh Hendrickson
Across the world, more people are working from home than ever, which naturally calls for more video conferencing. Zoom, a popular video conferencing solution, started as a winner in the fight for mindshare, but that’s slowly turning to a loss. After multiple privacy and security concerns cropped up, companies and schools are starting to ban the service.
It certainly hasn’t been an easy time for Zoom either; just the other day, it promised to pause feature updates to work on its security issues. That’s likely in response to the news that it sent data to Facebook about you, even if you don’t have Facebook. Or perhaps leaking user info is the problem. It might be the fact that Zoom’s custom encryption method is flawed. Or the problem might be that it may be sending data through China.
The list goes on, and that’s why schools and companies are starting to ban Zoom from employee use. The bans began with SpaceX and Nasa but quickly spread. PDLT-Smart sent out an internal memo banning Zoom, and not long after, Nevada’s Clark County school district banned Zoom.
Now New York city also issued the same directive to its schools. And Washington state’s Edmonds School District and Utah’s Alpine School District are considering similar bans.
Zoom rose as a popular service thanks to its ease of use. So long as the host has an account and the desktop software, anyone else can join a call without an account or software. But now it may be time to rethink what service to use in the future. To that extent, Skype can handle group calls even when no one involved has the software or an account.
