For Zoom, With Sudden Popularity Comes Benefits – And Scrutiny

In the short few weeks since large portions of the country and the world began practicing social distancing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of Zoom as a videoconferencing solution has been swift and broad.

Across the educational, private and corporate sectors, including among many adult companies, Zoom use and traffic have soared (along with those of Cisco’s WebEx, which has received less attention than Zoom, possibly because its brand name isn’t quite as catchy). For Zoom, the surge in use has been accompanied by certain benefits – as well as increasing scrutiny.

On the plus side, from Zoom’s perspective, was an announcement issued by the Federal Communications Commission last Friday, in which the FCC announced it has issued a “temporary waiver of its access arbitrage rules” to Inteliquent, a telecommunications company that carries traffic for both Zoom and WebEx.

In the announcement, the FCC said that without the waiver, “the massive increase in conference calls made by American consumers using Zoom and WebEx to work and attend classes from home during the COVID-19 pandemic would likely result in Inteliquent being deemed an ‘access-stimulating’ carrier” under the FCC’s rules. That designation would “trigger financial responsibilities—namely significant cost increases—for Inteliquent that would impede its ability to serve these conference calling companies.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said that the FCC’s access-stimulating carrier rules were designed to target “companies that have been exploiting our intercarrier compensation system by generating inflated call volumes to pad their bottom lines” and “weren’t intended to ensnare companies that, during a national emergency, are experiencing unprecedented call volumes that would push them out of compliance without a waiver.”

Since Inteliquent doubtlessly would have passed those cost increases along to the two customers primarily responsible for its increased usage, the FCC’s waiver was a welcome development for Zoom and Cisco, as well.

On the increased scrutiny side of the ledger, Zoom has quickly found itself under fire from privacy advocates, who are taking the company to task over allegedly falsely claiming their video calls offer “end to end” encryption. Other reports assert that Zoom is “leaking peoples’ email addresses and photos to strangers,” as Motherboard put it.

The latter of those claims has already resulted in a pair of lawsuits being filed against Zoom in California. The plaintiffs in those complaints allege that Zoom shared personally identifiable information, including users’ device models, locations, phone carriers and other information that’s useful to marketers – and that the plaintiffs would prefer not to be shared without their express consent.

“Had Zoom informed its users that it would use inadequate security measures and permit unauthorized third-party tracking of their personal information, users—like plaintiff and class members—would not have been willing to use the Zoom App,” wrote lawyers representing the plaintiff class, according to Law.com. “Instead, plaintiff and class members would have forgone using Zoom and/or chosen a different videoconferencing product that did not send their personal information to Facebook, or any other third party.”

Katherine Aizpuru, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, told Law.com that the issue is “extremely important now, because businesses, families and individuals are increasingly connecting via Zoom.”

“But it would be important even if many states were not under stay at home orders,” Aizpuru added. “Protecting consumer privacy is only becoming more important as more of our lives move online.”

Zoom hasn’t responded directly to the allegations in the lawsuits, but it did publish a blog post explaining the company has changed the way its software interacts with Facebook.

“We originally implemented the ‘Login with Facebook’ feature using the Facebook SDK for iOS (Software Development Kit) in order to provide our users with another convenient way to access our platform,” Zoom Founder and CEO Eric S. Yuan wrote in the blog post. “However, we were made aware on Wednesday, March 25, 2020, that the Facebook SDK was collecting device information unnecessary for us to provide our services. The information collected by the Facebook SDK did not include information and activities related to meetings such as attendees, names, notes, etc., but rather included information about devices such as the mobile OS type and version, the device time zone, device OS, device model and carrier, screen size, processor cores, and disk space.”

As is apparently obligatory when company’s address privacy issues related to their products and services, Yuan added that customers’ privacy is “incredibly important to us,” so the company has “decided to remove the Facebook SDK in our iOS client and have reconfigured the feature so that users will still be able to log in with Facebook via their browser.”

It’s up to each Zoom user to decide whether the concerns raised about Zoom’s privacy issues are deal-killers, or if the company’s moves to close the holes are sufficient to allay those concerns. If the class action filed against Zoom moves forward and you’re a user deemed to be part of the plaintiff class, joining the lawsuit may eventually become an option for you, too.

Regardless of what else lies ahead for the company, Zoom’s software seems destined to continue to be widely used during the ongoing pandemic, at least for the weeks ahead, as more country, state and municipal governments issues new shelter in place orders or extend those already in place.

Zoom meeting image by Zoom, provided in the company’s media kit