Ever since privacy loopholes in popular video-conferencing app Zoom surfaced, the company has been mired in a serious controversy. Organizations and even governments globally have questioned the company’s ethics, while some have already banned its usage. To add salt to the wound, a class action lawsuit has now been filed against Zoom Video Communications.
The complaint was filed in a San Francisco federal court by shareholder Michael Drieu. The lawsuit accuses the company and its top officials of hiding the privacy loopholes in the app’s software. The lawsuit also mentions unauthorized disclosure of personal information to third parties like Facebook as well as a lack of end to end encryption (Facebook just had to be there, didn’t it?).
The complainant claims the callousness from the company has caused the stocks to go into a free fall. The shares closed at $113.75 on Tuesday, down by another 7.5%. Zoom’s market value has been shaved off by almost a third, ever since the fiasco unfolded.
Many organizations have already banned the use of the app, including SpaceX which asked employees to use other alternative means of communication. NASA has issued similar instructions as well, asking its employees to refrain from using the app. Recently, the government of Taiwan also completely banned the official use of app citing privacy concerns.
The video-conferencing app shot to fame amid the ongoing lockdowns as people look to fill the social void caused by the restrictions besides thousands of employees worldwide looking to work from home. All was going well for Zoom, with over 200 Million active users in March, until the news surfaced that it transfers all its user data to Facebook, whether the user has an account on Facebook or not. It was also found that the chats on the app are not end-to-end encrypted. There have been cases of “Zoom Bombing” too, which gave strangers access to meetings and post hate-filled content, and nothing has been the same since.
However, CEO and founder Eric Yuan has since been on an apology tour of sorts, accepting that “they had fallen short of the expectations of people as well as themselves.”
Yuan in a blog post also affirmed that they have fixed some of the flaws.
“We took action to remove the Facebook SDK in our iOS client and have reconfigured it to prevent it from collecting unnecessary device information from our users. We updated our privacy policy to be more clear and transparent around what data we collect and how it is used explicitly clarifying that we do not sell our users’ data, we have never sold user data in the past, and have no intention of selling users’ data going forward,” he said in the post.