The Zoom Hype Train Losing Steam
As the global workforce shifts from working centrally to working remotely, video conferencing services have been all the rage. One service in particular has risen to the top of the business community’s mind share and that is Zoom.
According to Zoom CEO, their user base has rocketed to 200 million daily paid and free users from just 10 million in December 2019; and its not hard to see why. You can easily setup a web meeting to host up to 100 participants, as long as your meeting is less than 40 minutes. You get a high quality audio and visual web meeting experience. Most importantly this is all part their free offering.
However the rise in use of Zoom from universities lectures to business meetings, has led to the Zoom service being scrutinized by the tech community and the internet has pounced on Zoom’s vulnerabilities.
Zoom and Privacy, not a good match
Zoom claims to provide end-to-end encryption for the Web Meetings they host. However on further inspection, IT experts have described that their marketing has been ‘misleading’ at best, and some have even gone so far to suggest that Zoom could be classified as ‘Malware’ at worst. There even have been reports that the Zoom app on mobile phones, has been sending user data back to Facebook without consent.
Don’t get Zoom-bombed
What does that even mean? Zoom-bombing is a phenomenon where uninvited guests use Zoom’s screen-sharing feature to broadcast questionable content or just be a nuisance within the meeting. This trend is so popular now that ‘the internet is now rife with places where you can organize Zoom-bombing raids’. There is even a tool that can now can find 100 Zoom meeting IDs per hour.
Here is a guide on how to prevent your meetings from getting Zoom-bombed, but it still shouldn’t be this easy to find Zoom meeting IDs.
Where to Zoom to now?
The backlash from the IT community plus the rising number of Zoom-bombings has led Zoom CEO apologizing, and making a promise to focus all their efforts on patching their security issues over the next 90 days. Although that is a good news, it really doesn’t give business leaders any confidence in the meantime. Perhaps its time you consider using a different web conferencing tool instead.
