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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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Remember: the corporate meetings and university lectures are the tip of the iceberg of the kind of data Zoom has on people.
Zoom is used by teenage couples to call each other and hang out, which might turn into discussing sexual themes as teenagers dating often do.
Zoom is used by general-care doctors when their patients describe the rash on their anus.
Zoom is used by psychiatrists and therapists talking to their patients during some of the most vulnerable and precarious times of their lives.
Zoom is used by lawyers talking to their clients in all kind of cases, criminal, civil, divorce/family, inheritance, etc.
Zoom was used by actual fucking courts to hold actual fucking criminal trials. Like bruh the fucking US judiciary department couldn't have self-hosted one of the many open source and E2EE solutions?
The fact that they can do this with no oversight or regulatory bodies intervening is utterly ridiculous. Zoom has probably some of the most sensitive data of people's lives. It is not a social media platform where people know that they shouldn't put too sensitive information on, it was literally intended and marketed for people to use for sensitive communications. They shouldn't even be keeping any amount of data after the call ends, IMO, but using it to train an AI (to presumably sell later) is utterly morally bankrupt, and so are the regulatory agencies and lawmakers who could have intervened. Fuck you Zoom, fuck you FCC/FTC/whoever handles data privacy in the US. You want to ban TikTok because of its "national security implications" but don't bat an eye when it's a US company doing something far worse huh? Not implying I like TikTok, but TikTok doesn't have access to live court trials or doctor-patient discussions.
Yes, we shouldn't have used Zoom in the first place. But that ship has sailed and most people were forced to use it against their will if their company/university/doctor/lawyer/judge decides to use it, and/or they did not realize the terrible data security/privacy implications of using it. It's entirely unhelpful to victim blame and go "well you shouldn't have used Zoom then! Sucks for you" as I see so many people in the FLOSS/privacy community doing. Additionally, that also does not address the actual societal/legislative issues of them being allowed to keep that information and use it for profit.
It should be said that many business customers do use a self-hosted version of Zoom. I couldn't say for sure if every court did, but major government bodies definitely used something more than the free package, which come with different T&Cs.
This is the big issue in online user data. In no other instance in life can someone take something without offering anything in return. Yes, websites are usually free, but Microsoft collect your data from the software you already pay them for. Just like you can't build and sell a car without paying for the nuts and bolts, there needs to be clear legal infrastructure to prevent data businesses from getting away with taking everyone's data for free and using it to develop products for pure profit.