From yoga classes to worldwide webinars, Zoom community has been expanding all around the world after the global lockdown due to COVID-19.
Zoom’s tremendous progress has led its daily cloud meetings surged up to AS MANY AS 300 Million users each day.
But that’s not all…
There’d been huge backlashes from several multinational companies, and major bans from Ericsson and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which brought immense distrust and suspicion among Zoom users for the free video calls.
While the CEO Eric Yuan’s take was:
“We did not design the product with the foresight that, in a matter of weeks, every person in the world would suddenly be working, studying, and socialising from home,"
So, what’s really going on?
Zoom has been heavily criticized of falsely claiming toprovide security and privacy tools to its users over previous versions of the app, and it turned out that many user’s images and email information were vulnerable to stranger, or even hacker’s attack.
What..? What is Zoom doing to cater these bans?
These huge criticisms and bans from its use in countries like Germany, US and India urged Zoom to turn up a 90-day security plan, which finally brought down the latest 5.0 version that has got updates on security glitches and resolves most of the privacy issues.
So here are major 5 security updates from them.
1. Encrypted Video Calls:
Zoom 5.0 is finally releasing an encryption of video calls in the latest update. A “feature for all of our users around the globe – free and paid”, implementing from July 2020.
Previously, Zoom video calls were wrongly claimed to be end-to-end encrypted.
2) No More ‘Zoombombing’:
Zoombombing, a new type of virtual break-in, where an unwanted person joins the video call with the intention of interrupting the meeting, and may shout slurs, or show disturbing images on the video call.
The good news?
The new update brings in the option for hosts to keep a password for their meetings as well as the waiting room option so only relevant people gets to enter the meeting.
Also, the admin has options of muting participants, sharing only their own screen, and restrict chatting in between, thus preventing unnecessary bugs during the meeting.
3. Reporting Options:
Unlike the previous versions, the new updates got ‘report a participant’ option for all users to potentially report a pranksters or bad actors across the board. The reported participant’s profile is investigated by Zoom Safety team and is even blocked from the app if doomed necessary.
4. Zoom is Not Selling User’s Data:
In response to the story published by Motherboard from Vice which claimed that Zoom has been leaking user’s app information and data to Facebook, even if a user has not been logged in to Facebook, Eric Yuan has made clear mark that Zoom ‘will not sell user’s data’.
Thankfully, the recent update to its iOS app, Zoom has stopped the sharing of information to Facebook and rather, users can safely open Facebook over other browsers while video calling on Zoom.
5. Attendee Attention Tracking:
Zoom had previously launched this feature enabling admins to know if the participants are spending more than 30 seconds on other tabs other than Zoom during the video conference.
However, Zoom has disabled this feature as well ‘as part of our commitment to the security and privacy of our customers’.
Zoom has been enjoying multi-fold growth due to its easy-to-use features and super convenient video calls for all people around the world, and the team has been continually updating on its security and privacy tools to keep the users happy and satisfied.