Zoom and Privacy Concern
- Ayush Chaurasia, DNLU, Jabalpur
- September 22, 2020
Content :
Growth in communication technologies offer new opportunities for the conduct of qualitative research. Amidst these, zoom— a video conferencing platform—has sort of distinctive features that intensify its potential appeal to qualitative and mixed-methods researchers. Due to their massive growth over the past few months, Zoom has been placed firmly within the global spotlight – and rightfully so – regarding their security and privacy practices. The Supreme Court of India, alongside courts across the world, are equally concerned about this technology. While there are very legitimate questions on Zoom security, it’s important to know that Zoom can and does provide a secure, usable platform when used correctly. A bit like other cloud-based video solutions, Zoom has similar security capabilities and challenges. Zoom is often configured to satisfy various compliance requirements and has been utilized in various regulated industries for quite a while, but it does require an intentional approach. As part of the response to COVID-19, Zoom has been quickly rolled out by many organizations – and a few of these organizations moved forward without fully thinking through the security decisions needed for their Zoom instance. Additionally, due to its growing prevalence, the Zoom platform is now a larger target for attackers. This year, trouble surrounding the use of Zoom arose with critical security vulnerabilities allowing hackers to foresee Meeting ID’s and therefore join active meetings, and also enabling any website to forcibly join a user to a Zoom call with their video camera activated and without the user’s permission. Zoom refused to disable the ability for hackers to forcefully join a call anyone visiting a malicious site, raising security red flags and undermining public confidence in Zoom’s attitude towards data security. The purpose of this document is to highlight the most common and relevant issues highlighted about Zoom, and most importantly, what actions have been or need to be taken to address these risks.
