Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act | Hacker News Reader

Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

blogs.harvard.edu

1,597 pointsseapunk509 comments

As other people have stated in this thread everything in Zoom's privacy policy seems to indicate they are sending data to advertisers only as necessary to advertise their own products. They likely:

- Use the Facebook iOS SDK to measure conversions from app install ads

- Send a list of hashed email addresses to Facebook or other advertisers to do ad re-targeting

- Have Google Analytics on their websites to track where people are visiting their website from, i.e. a click on a Google AdWords ad

While these are all not _ideal_ because _yes_, Google and Facebook use this data for their own purposes as well, it's far from _nefarious_. In fact, it's pretty standard fare. Could Zoom go above and beyond and reject these tools? Yes, they could. Does anyone in practice? No.

If Zoom was selling metadata about their calls, leaking contents of their calls, or themselves served ads – then yes, I'd be concerned. But all indications point to them purchasing ads to further the growth of their business.

I think it is perfectly reasonable to seek guarantees around the usage of the above, more sensitive data (contents of video calls, metadata of video calls, etc.) but on the flip side to imply from their privacy policy that they are sending it to Facebook or that they are "in the advertising business" is jumping the gun a little bit.

If their Privacy Policy doesn't say they won't sell or distribute call metadata or contents, I have to assume they will. If they want to update their Privacy Policy to make that clearer, I would encourage that.

(And hashed email addresses? Might as well just send the email addresses. Hashing is kind of useless there.)

Yeah, I hope that the outcome of all of this negative attention is that Zoom publishes those guarantees. What’d be even better, though, is if they enforce them with tech – WhatsApp and FaceTime both offer end to end encrypted group calling.

Hashed contact info is just how Facebook intakes contact information. Makes it harder for them to get the info of non-Facebook users who are patrons of the business. They claim to delete it: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/112061095610075?id=24...

> WhatsApp and FaceTime both offer end to end encrypted group calling.

These are closed source, right? How do you know this feature works?

You don't, because you can't.

> standard fare

Aka "common sense" aka "anything that will fit within the Overton window"

Not to be confused with "decent, moral behavior"

I suppose, but why would you single out Zoom and expect them to act more decent and morally than any other company? Is there any reason you would expect this?

Calling out the biggest players is fine. They have the most resources to roll their own or at least shop around, should they value their users privacy.

The Overton window - fascinating.

I'm waiting for these conferencing apps to feed into clearview ai.

Gotta love when HN users go out of their way to apologize for disgusting and immortal behavior by tech companies. I'd expect nothing less.

This is the most levelheaded comment I've see in this thread. Not least because I have literally never seen an ad run on either the Zoom website or the app. Moreover, Zoom is one of the most successful SaaS companies in the world because their unit economics on their basic business model (of selling premium subsriptions) is literally better than almost any other SaaS company out there: https://tomtunguz.com/benchmarking-zoom-s-s-1-how-7-key-metr...

> One key driver of profitability is labor-market arbitrage. Nearly one third of Zoom’s team, and the majority of its engineering team is based in China. The result is the company spends less than 10% of its revenue on R&D, which is less than half the median of the peer set.

The other thing that's important is the privacy policy includes their marketing site You can see a clear list of tools that zoom uses on their Content Management System (CMS) aka Zoom.us here: https://builtwith.com/zoom.us

Why would it be jumping the gun? They can, so they will. It's been like this with every US company that has been looked at in this way.

I just downloaded Zoom for Mac, saw that it was a .pkg file. Great, I can see what files it installs before I install it.

I open the .pkg, click Continue so it can run its script, then a second later Installer quits and the app launches. What?!

Turns out, Zoom installs the entire app in the 'preinstall' script of the installer package! Inside there's a copy of '7z', and the app is extracted with that. The preinstall script is littered with typos and poor grammar.

I'm not one of those people who thinks that Apple is going to force all Mac software to come through the App Store, but when I see stuff this stupid...I start to wonder.

This is exactly what creeped me out when I first installed Zoom years ago.

Very few people cared when I commented this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20398084

Suffice it to say, I no longer trust Zoom to be running in my regular user account. I have a separate user on my Mac to isolate it. If you have the means, you might even consider a spare computer or a VM to run Zoom.

I use my iPad for Zoom. One of the few times I'm glad the App Store and sandbox exist.

Even their iOS/iPadOS app is annoying, because the first time you open it and sign in, it pops 3 (!) permission dialogs (Calendar, Notifications, and TouchID/FaceID). Way too aggressive IMO.

Now, if only they'd make a Mac App Store version of Zoom. I'd be so happy...

Man, it's disappointing to hear this has stayed the same for so long. In the future, Apple should sandbox 'preflight' to disallow writing files, and then enforce it as a condition of notarization.

More details from @c1truz_ on Twitter: https://twitter.com/c1truz_/status/1244737672930824193

I feel like Zoom has a history of doing shady things under the vail of "ease of use" (referring to the uninstall complaints a few months ago).

I do think on macOS the average user doesn't understand DMG files, run apps from inside the DMG instead of copying them to /Applications and deleting the disk image. My guess is that most people install Zoom after a meeting has started and this was the quickest, fewest dialog method of getting it up and running.

Stop apologizing for them. It's literally two more clicks, and anyone who has gone through the flow expects those clicks. Also, if Installer never realizes it installed something, it won't even offer to delete the installer .pkg.

I'm pointing this out not as an excuse for Zoom, but as an example of long-standing friction in macOS. I think it's worth pointing out they've had the same motivations in the past. Like Dropbox, I hope the OS improves so this isn't necessary and knowing this is a pattern (and not a one-off) with the company I will avoid them when possible.

There are already good solutions to this issue. In particular, simply placing the app package in a zip file, then checking to see if it's installed correctly when opened.

> run apps from inside the DMG instead of copying them to /Applications and deleting the disk image

First, there's nothing wrong with that.

Also, some apps display a message asking to be moved to /Applications when launched from a DMG.

> First, there's nothing wrong with that.

Sure, you can technically run .app from most places. It becomes problematic in that you can't write to that directory or self update the app if it's still in the DMG. If you reboot you have to know to remount before launching. Not having it in /Applications also becomes a mess if you're in a multi-user environment.

> Also, some apps display a message asking to be moved to /Applications when launched from a DMG.

This is the kind of friction and extra dialog boxes I'm sure they were avoiding.

Personally, I hate pkg files. I wish macOS had a better flow for unsavvy users to deal with DMG and app files.

There is also a feature called App Translocation that further restricts the abilities of applications launched from disk images.

I read this like 10 minutes after installing Zoom on my Mac. Yikes. Anyone have a list of files and processes I can tweeze out (beyond the obvious files, which I've already purged)?

Here's the answer: https://gist.github.com/al45tair/73be245ab87a66a885742b98be9...

Next time, open the .pkg with Pacifier.

I think you mean Pacifist (https://www.charlessoft.com/) which you can use to extract the app directly

Since this .pkg completely subverts how packages are supposed to work, none of the files show up in Pacifist. Everything is in 'Scripts', which is a .cpio.gz.

While I also dislike this type of thing, remember that Zoom's business is built on getting people into calls as quickly as possible. Seconds matter.

So I can totally understand why they would want to use 7zip to shave kilobytes off the download size.

7zip isn’t the complaint, it’s that the installer installs the app before the user OKs it.

Honestly zoom is something that I would never let near a personal computer. What really surprised me is that there’s a “zoomgov.” (a friend at a defense contractor showed me) Either our government is enjoying the benefits of being able to force companies to be audited because of defense budgets or things have become way more relaxed than they should be. Judging by our “stockpiles” and inability to get critical equipment I’m guessing the second one.

> 7zip isn’t the complaint, it’s that the installer installs the app before the user OKs it.

...I was about to write a reply saying "well in that case I don't understand what the GP is complaining about", but then I opened up the installer again.

I didn't fully take in what the parent was saying. Zoom is completely short-circuiting the normal macOS package install flow. You click continue once to acknowledge that "this package will run a program to determine if the software can be installed", and then Zoom is suddenly installed and the installer exits.

I can understand why they did it, but it's not good.

Although, Apple deserves some blame here. Firstly because their non-app-store software install flow has been screwed up since the release of Lion, and secondly because why can't you use Installer's "Show Files" option before the preinstall step?

I'm not a MacOS user, but I'm having a really hard time getting my head around this:

1. You download an installer.

2. You activate that installer.

3. Your system tells you that the installer can run some code.

4. You agree to the installer running some code.

5. The installer installs some software, via the code that you said the installer could run.

Seems perfectly acceptable to me. If you literally cannot open up the archive file to inspect its contents without running some code inside it, that's not Zoom's problem. It's just a really stupid decision on the part of Apple.

Apparently, there's an upgrade for HIPPA compliance, too. I have no idea what that entails or how to tell from the client-side if that's in place. I was working with a medical provider and had to switch to remote sessions. Our first VC was cancelled last minute because they were upgrading the account for HIPPA.

This is a great point. People understand installers/.pkg files far better than `.app`'s wrapped in a DMG. Those often get launched inside the DMG which has a ton of other issues, rather than being dragged to the Application folder.

Also packages allow for easier deployment rather than dmg's.

This isn't the point, it's the fact that the installer is being abused to install an app without even giving the user the option to proceed or not. Nothing should be installed as part of the preflight.

Par for the course with Zoom, so it seems.

I don't think it installs it I think it just calls the resource from the package.

NVM I decided to inspect the package with `pkgutil`

Here's the offending code

```################################### function install_app_to_path(){ #path=$1 InstallPath="$1/.zoomus_"$(date)"" mkdir -p "$InstallPath" mkdir -p "$InstallPath/Frameworks" if [[ $? != 0 ]] ; then rm -rf "$InstallPath" return 1 fi

    if [[ -d "$1/zoom.us.app" ]] ; then
        rm -f "$1/zoom.us.app/Contents/Info.plist"
        mv "$1/zoom.us.app/Contents" "$InstallPath/trash"
    fi

    if [[ $? != 0 ]] ; then
        rm -rf "$InstallPath"
        return 4
    fi

    rm -rf "$1/zoom.us.app"
    if [[ $? != 0 ]] ; then
        rm -rf "$InstallPath"
        return 4
    fi

    mdfind 'kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier == "us.zoom.xos"'> .zoom.us.applist.txt

    echo "["$(date)"]un7z zm.7z =================================" >>"$LOG_PATH"
    if [[ -f res.7z ]] ; then
        ./7zr x -mmt ./res.7z -o"$InstallPath/Frameworks"&
    fi

    if [[ -f resReitna.7z ]] ; then
        ./7zr x -mmt ./resReitna.7z -o"$InstallPath/Frameworks"&
    fi

    if [[ -f bundles.7z ]] ; then
        ./7zr x -mmt ./bundles.7z -o"$InstallPath/Frameworks"&
    fi

    un7zresult=$(./7zr x -mmt ./zm.7z -o"$InstallPath" 2>>"$LOG_PATH")
    ret=$?
    echo "["$(date)"]check un7z return:$ret, $un7zresult">>"$LOG_PATH"
    wait
    echo "["$(date)"]un7z all finished">>"$LOG_PATH"
    if [[ $ret != 0 ]] ; then
        rm -rf "$InstallPath"
        return 3
    fi

    mv "$InstallPath/Frameworks/"* "$InstallPath/zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks">>"$LOG_PATH"
    mv "$InstallPath/zoom.us.app" "$1" >>"$LOG_PATH"
    if [[ $? != 0 ]] ; then
        rm -rf "$InstallPath"
        return 1
    fi

    if [[ "$APP_PATH" == "$GLOBAL_APP_PATH" ]] ; then
        chmod -R 775 "$APP_PATH"
        chown -R :admin "$APP_PATH"
    fi

    echo "["$(date)"]mv $InstallPath/zoom.us.app into $1">>"$LOG_PATH"

    rm -rf "$InstallPath"&
    return 0

}```

> Seconds matter.

Whenever I have been told that I have a meeting coming up with some kind of conferencing software that I don't have installed, I immediately install it. I don't wait until 3 minutes before the call to try and install. All kinds of things could happen, such as incompatibilities or missing passcodes.

I have a need for Zoom, virus or no, but the point of the article is why I don't give them money. Give them money, while the company is apparently still going to worry about milking advertising dollars out of me? That's just going to be a strong "no". As the final paragraph of TFA says, either charge more or give away less for free. But if you're selling me out to advertisers after I've given you money, then you're one of "those" companies that I avoid if at all possible. Because they're skeezy. You don't want to appear skeezy, do you, Zoom?

So for now Skype and MS Teams works fine, or at least fine enough that I don't bother with Zoom. Which brings me to a side question: what is the value proposition for Zoom? What does their product do so much better than the others that I'd put up with this shit? Why am I hearing the hell out of it lately? Outstanding PR department?

EDIT: thanks for your answers to “why use it, then?” Because “it just works” seems to be the summary, which hoo boy, one cannot say about a lot of the competition.

> What does their product do so much better than the others that I'd put up with this shit?

I'll share my perspective as an academic. Many of us have adopted Zoom, practically overnight, for our teaching, for one-on-one meetings with students, and even for conferences [1].

The answer is: It just works. It's easy. It does what we want it to, with a minimum of fuss.

As someone who now has a whole bunch of unanticipated shit to deal with, this is one less thing to worry about.

I definitely share your objection in principle. If this situation continues long into the future (a terrifying thought), then perhaps I'll revisit my choice of software. But in the short term, to be honest, I don't much care.

[1] https://www.daniellitt.com/agonize/

> The answer is: It just works.

I've actually found the opposite to be true. Google Meet is an example of a product that just works. Zoom, by contrast, pushes you very heavily into downloading and installing an application on every device you want to use it with, and provides a secondary degraded experience in the browser if you find the right link to use it (which you have to do EVERY SINGLE TIME; there doesn't seem to be a way to permanently opt out of the "install this application" nag flow).

> The answer is: It just works. It's easy. It does what we want it to, with a minimum of fuss.

I think the real reason is "it's just what everyone else was doing." All of these apps "just work," as someone who has used a veritable gaggle let me tell you there's scarce difference between them. Except zoom makes it more difficult to join without the app (others work in the browser outright, zoom tricks you into installing).

Zoom I think just happens to be one of the trendiest. But with this kind of behavior there's really no reason to use them.

it kinda works. I've had a lot more luck running massive meetings with the open source and free alternative jitsi. Their offering https://meet.jit.si/ is amazingly simple with no installs and definitely 'Just works' to the point that in lockdown I use it for family catchups, large friend coffee + beer catch ups and all meetings because all I need to do is send people a URL and they literally just have to click it with no plugin installs etc.

> The answer is: It just works. It's easy. It does what we want it to, with a minimum of fuss.

I guess I'd like to know the details of how its easier than the other of myriad of products on the market for you?

At my company we use Slack Video calls, WebEx, and Zoom, and they seem as identical as each other (I'd argue Slack is easiest since we're all logged into it all the time, but that's us).

I mean, so do all the major WebRTC video chat programs. Google Meet is absolutely painless, and I can use it in the browser instead of downloading Zoom's very sketchy application.

I also doesn't max out all four cores of my laptop and run my fans like a hair dryer like all the web based ones I've tried.

I’m interested to hear the type of institution and age range of students with whom you are having 1 to 1 video calls. I’m a teacher in an 11-18 secondary school in the U.K., and we have been instructed to avoid 1 to 1s with students as a safeguarding risk.

I’m not casting any aspersions here, I’m only interested in comparing notes with a fellow teacher.

> I definitely share your objection in principle. If this situation continues long into the future (a terrifying thought), then perhaps I'll revisit my choice of software. But in the short term, to be honest, I don't much care.

Do the students not care?

Many music teachers are doing online lessons now, mostly via Zoom.

It seems that Zoom is the only popular videoconferencing software these days that allows you to disable all the postprocessing on the audio signal (echo cancellation, noise reduction, etc) through advanced settings. This postprocessing is very useful for /conversation/ meetings among many people with bad audio setups, but for two musicians and music signals, the postprocessing is highly detrimental, causing strange audio artifacts and causing instruments to drop out sporadically.

(It seems like there would be a market for videoconferencing software optimized for musicians, where the audio signal is sent at higher quality, given higher priority, and not postprocessed in detrimental ways. And without all the privacy concerns.)

Zoom is the first video conferencing platform that I've used, that works reliably. They are gonna come out of this mess smelling like roses, no matter what carbuncles are exposed.

I've been doing videoconferencing for over 30 years (Yes, they had it back then -we used PictureTel systems, over ISDN).

I regularly participate in Zoom meetings with 20 or more attendees. I know of ones that have over 400.

An amazing thing to me, is that technophobes can pick up on it very easily. Very little of that pre-meeting "Mute your mike!", "Can you hear me?", "Whose dog is that?", tons of texts, asking for help, etc, stuff.

Skype is very bad for more than a small handful of attendees.

WebEx and GoToMeeting are OK, I guess, and I've heard good things about BlueJeans.

But Zoom is what I use, and Zoom is very popular with people that suddenly need to gather, and can't do so, physically.

If your concern is privacy, why are you using Skype and MS Teams?

If you don't want a third party getting your contact information, then use a private solution that's actually private. Jitsi and Matrix are open source solutions that both support video conferencing.

I just Ctrl+F'd Google Meet and no one seems to be really talking about it. We've been using it for our meetings for a long time and it works really well. I'm wondering why it doesn't have widespread adoption. You can call-in via phone, can log the minutes of the meeting and seems to "just work" too

Have you taken a look at [0]WhereBy? It's been recommended as a great alternative to Zoom.

[0]https://whereby.com/

I've used Skype (for business and normal Skype), FaceTime etc. The Zoom experience is just much better for larger groups (> 10).

I use Teams at work and would say it is comparable to Zoom in terms of AV quality (Microsoft owns both Skype and Teams portfolios, but Teams is built on a modern codebase that runs on different, markedly superior infra than Skype). Unfortunately Teams only works in the enterprise (O365), and it is still fairly new so it doesn't have a lot of the collab functionality like whiteboarding and breakout rooms that Zoom has.

Privacy issues aside, Zoom really is a better product. People are more forgiving of a product's peccadillos when it just works.

Not much different to Microsoft. Buy Windows, still get tracking and ads. I use it because it’s convenient.

Hard to justify moving from zoom to ms teams when Microsoft have shown they don’t care about privacy either.

> So for now Skype and MS Teams works fine, or at least fine enough that I don't bother with Zoom. Which brings me to a side question: what is the value proposition for Zoom? What does their product do so much better than the others that I'd put up with this shit?

For me, it's one of the few video chat clients that works well in Linux. Skype may or may not work depending on the version and whether or not Microsoft supports the Linux client. And I have no idea whether MS teams works at all in Linux.

> Because “it just works” seems to be the summary

I am using it in chromium on linux, and I can tell you it does not just work. The audio is really really shit (constant crackling). I'm basically unable to attend meetings on zoom. Luckily most of them are in google meet which works fine in a browser.

I'm with you. I have no idea what people like about it that isn't already done better in e.g. Google Meet. Having to download a program is also really crappy IMO. Plenty of other video chat applications work in my browser.

I said this at the beginning of the crisis and first major rush to Zoom by many companies: their start-up friendly business model is going to bite them hard when they have to blitzscale services and there will be growing pains while they find the right non-vc-subsidized pricing model for long-term customers.

I think we can cut them some slack for now as they are under more pressure then many other tech companies. They managed to make a great product - so presumably they'll be able to build the right processes for the company itself soon too.

I am also confused about why zoom is the de-facto conference tool now. I have been working remotely for 6 years and haven't really noticed it being significantly better than other tools like Lifesize or Bluejeans. Also, the inability to draw on the presenter's screen is a big negative in my opinion. Trying to pair lately over Zoom always ends in a bunch of stammering like "erase that dot over there.. no... over there... no, up left..."

> Give them money, while the company is apparently still going to worry about milking advertising dollars out of me?

Does Zoom have ads? I haven't seen any. I believe all of the ad tracking is for the reverse: Zoom wants to see if their own advertising is effective. For example, if they buy an ad on Facebook that you saw and then you install the app, they can attribute the install to that ad and measure ROI.

Zoom decided to remove the Facebook SDK in their iOS client https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/03/27/zoom-use-of-facebo... fixing this issue.

Alternatives might be Jitsi and the 8x8 supported by Jitsi tech.

> the company is apparently still going to worry about milking advertising dollars out of me

They will never not do that. Paying customer or not, no business is ever going to say "let's give up a huge amount of revenue so we can avoid invading people's privacy and annoying them with ads they don't want to see". To do so would be to miss an opportunity to make even more money.

The fact you're a paying customer also implies you have disposable income and you're willing to spend it. Ironically, paying money to avoid advertising makes your attention even more valuable to advertisers.

The only way they'll stop advertising is if it's not profitable. The only solution is to block all ads and reduce their return on investment as much as possible.

I don't get it. I get that you don't like the adalytics-based business model, you don't use the product. But I don't see a rational basis for making that conditional on cash price, which is an independent concern. It only makes sense if you value the product at somewhere between the cash price and (the cash price - the adalytics cost), and $0 cost is exceedingly unlikely to be the exact boundary.

It only makes sense if you make the unsupported leap in logic that says that the cash price is itself promise to not use analytics. But you are willing to accept $0 adalytics-supported products, and FOSS exists and some has adalytics and some doesnt, showing that $0 is not any kind of meaningful boundary.

It also just works on Linux - video, screen sharing, window sharing, remote control, whiteboard. Moreover: recording, simple way to mute anyone as host, host less rooms. 1-100 peers? no problem. No need to create account for guests to participatie.

My take: Zoom is very approachable outside of enterprise. Skype (although historically has its roots with regular folks), is mostly used in a "Skype for Business" config. MS Teams is much the same way.

Good PR helps too, I suppose.

So many replies here have identified the value of Zoom: it is easy to use and has reasonably good quality. So the questions I have: can we add to this? Are there ways to use Zoom more privately?

Personally I haven't seen many people offer up alternatives that are clear winners. They all have tradeoffs. Since there's tradeoffs I have a hard time moving people to some other direction. If I could says, "Oh Zoom is nice, but Schmooz is the best!" I know people who'd make the move. Even if it's paid.

>> what is the value proposition for Zoom?

Energy consumption. Half hour hangouts drains 30% of battery 3 hours zoom is roughly 5-10%. UX and performance the two major factors why we chose Zoom.

I think you hearing a lot about it because (a) everyone is quarantined and wanting to use the tools they use at work to help setup book club meetings, table-top RPG sessions (did this last night and it actually worked great), etc. (b) it's perhaps easier to use than some others, (c) there's likely a huge PR push right now, and (d) I believe its pricing is better for non-enterprise use than others.

My company's virtual meeting solutions are a mess; it's the one really messy area in our tooling. For the longest time we had GoTo, but then the dev team specifically also had hipchat for Slack-like interactions. Then hipchat went away, and for some reason the org took that as a cue to do an org-wide rollout of MS Teams, with no approval for us to use Slack. Somewhere along the way certain people somehow acquired Zoom licenses and started using those. Then just about two weeks ago the whole org was told to switch to Zoom, but now not enough people have licenses and all the old GoTo licenses are kaput.

Anyways, the reason I have heard various people from the business side give for why they like Zoom is "GoTo was too hard to use." I don't really see that, and I also wonder if there's some sort of 'FOMO' going on. A couple big vendors we interact with use Zoom, Zoom is big in the news currently -- "everybody uses Zoom!" I do also think it's maybe a bit cheaper at enterprise scale.

I don't mind Zoom from a UX/call quality perspective. I think Alt-A to unmute is super unintuitive but that's a very minor quibble, and for all I know shortcuts are customizable. I am, however, very discouraged by Zoom's privacy story as we're discussing here.

---

As my own side note, I am generally on board with almost everything MS has been doing lately -- we're mostly a MS shop as they help us with pricing, given we're a nonprofit, while AWS told us 'no chance' -- but Teams has to be the single buggiest MS product I've ever used. Just now, over the past month or so, I've noticed it very slowly improving. But for the first year of our usage, we experienced constant issues. Dropped calls, silent crashes, daily sync failures. My favorite one was, every time I would shut down Teams, it would relaunch itself a few seconds later with a message saying "sorry, Teams has crashed, we're recovering." Apparently every time the program received a shutdown msg it just assumed "oops, another crash."

> But if you're selling me out to advertisers after I've given you money, then you're one of "those" companies that I avoid if at all possible.

Sadly, this happens everywhere. Verizon and ATT? Selling your location and data usage patterns for years.

Bank accounts and credit cards? Selling your purchase patterns for decades.

Does anyone know what could Facebook do with such video calling data?

PS- I hate misuse of my data as much as the next person.

Having used a few of these lately, it seems to have the best quality of call.

Skype is terrible some days. Google hangouts is OK. Cisco Webx is dead in the water every time I have tried to use it.

Maybe I just haven't used Zoom enough as the other two do have good days and bad days.

Compared to the other ten or twenty videoconferencing solutions, it's the only one that has worked reliably and without accessibility issues for technical and non-technical people in my life. The automatic video and audio processing features make it so that a day-one user has as good an experience as a year-two user, and I haven't had to answer any technical support questions about it to my family.

FaceTime is the only serious competitor I can think of that's able to deliver as quality of a call experience in a 1:1 setting with non-technical participants, but it's inaccessible on Windows/Android for starters, and lacks the presentation chops to be used in a business setting.

To answer your last question - it works very well. I've used lots of virtual meeting software over the past 20 years, and zoom is by far the best.

I agree with your sentiment though - it makes me angry that they're selling my personal data. But sadly I don't think that any companies will voluntarily be non-skeezy...we really need laws and regulations in this space. I don't trust capitalism to take care of my privacy. If companies can get more money without breaking the law, they will absolutely do so.

Nothing works good enough to be worth forfeiture of our self respect

> As quarantined millions gather virtually on conferencing platforms, the best of those, Zoom, is doing very well.

Why would Zoom care about their privacy issues if they're doing so well off? Seems like that's a good amount of positive reinforcement that their current approach is the right one to them. Maybe they'll lose a few thousand customers because of it, but given what I'm sure was a huge increase in the past few weeks, why would it be something they're concerned about?

The reason Zoom is doing so well is part of its vulnerability. There is very little vendor lock-in with virtual conferencing platforms. If something new/better comes out next month, there isn't much a company will give up by switching vendors. There is little to no infrastructure to setup/maintain. This is the same reason Slack's popularity has skyrocketed. Because of the lack of history and transient nature of the content shared in them, these areas are quick to gain popularity, but also quick to be replaced when a better product emerges.

> This is the same reason Slack's popularity has skyrocketed. Because of the lack of history <snip>

Slack's business model [1] is storing all history and charging for access for it. Nothing transient about that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#Business_mode...

Is it common to want to keep all that history? My understanding was it's best practice to delete chats after a certain period to limit the surface area of any potential legal discovery.

You are correct that there is history, but my point is that I don't believe the existence of long lived chat history (storing all messages longer than 3-6 months) will be a blocker for a company to switch to a better chat platform. Chat should not be looked at as a durable store of critical, long term information. Slack is trying to create a vendor lock-in that doesn't exist.

We switched from Zoom to Slack as soon as we realised we could use Slack and it’s much easier. But there is a 15 person limit so we’ll switch out for something else in a bigger meeting. It’s too easy to switch.

We have a few thousand conference rooms around the world wired from Zoom. Much of it is probably commodity hardware that could be reconfigured for another platform, but it would still be a massive undertaking.

The unfortunate wisdom in business is "nobody cares about privacy or security," and in my experience it's true. Outside a small number of people nobody even asks these questions.

With our own product ZeroTier we get maybe 1-2 questions a year about privacy and so far only a few enterprise customers have even asked about the security of encryption and authentication. "It's encrypted" is good enough for 99.9% of the market. Encrypted with what? A cereal box cipher? Nobody cares.

What do people care about? In my experience its ease of use, ease of use, ease of use, ease of use, and ease of use, in no particular order. An app that's a privacy and security dumpster fire but is very easy to set up and use will win hands down over a better engineered one that requires even one or two more steps to set up.

My experience is diametrically opposite to that. All of our clients are large enterprises and the security and privacy features are very closely examined during procurement literally every time. We haven't had a single client conversation that is remotely like what you're describing.

Might be because our clients are banks but they really care about this stuff.

Completely agree with this, banks care. They don't always care in the best of ways, usually it's just about ticking a box in a spreadsheet, but at least they ask.

Actually - you'll be surprised at the shadow IT going on at places like this. Users will literally BEG anyone who knows how to get around these systems how to do so.

It's why your banker might use their cell phone for a zoom client when everyone else is on a computer - their work computer is locked down. Govt employees often the same way. You'll notice they are doing the phone call in or phone client vs their computer.

Lot's of companies, zoom included, get in through the user side not the big webex / cisco type sales process.

I worked in a place some time ago where someone was hired with the unofficial (but generally known) job description of defeating IT restrictions and security policies so people could actually get something done.

It's very very hard to lock down a network without drastically impacting productivity, especially if you have any kind of science, design, or development going on.

The few customers we've had that ask are large, so yes. I am speaking of the majority of individuals and small businesses.

> With our own product ZeroTier we get maybe 1-2 questions a year about privacy and so far only a few enterprise customers have even asked about the security of encryption and authentication.

Why would people ask you that? You already put the answers in the public documentation.

Because it's the right thing to do.

I agree, but Zoom is a publicly traded company. Their incentives aren't necessarily aligned with the public good.

The question is "why should Zoom leadership care about the recent privacy concerns if the vast majority of their customers don't care?"

Their stock is up over 6% today while the market is down 4% (volatility caveats here obviously). So far the privacy concerns don't seem to be impacting the companies short or long term prospects, so I wouldn't expect the company to do the right thing.

Surely, though, there is a way for zoom to do both at the same time. That you and one of your sibling posts gives them some benefit of the doubt (or at least the appearance of it) is... sad.

Right, but they are a US corporation in California. The "right thing to do" is pretty much at the end of their priorities list.

I don't think geography really changes the incentives.

It changes the culture. In my experience, Silicon Valley companies have more of a culture of growing at all costs. And they're either fanatical about privacy or they'll sell you out to the highest, middle, and lowest bidders all at once, then give it away free through an unpatched security hole too.

Because the EU is on lockdown, lots of EU citizens now using Zoom, and all of those users are potential liabilities due to GDPR issues.

The UK cabinet has been meeting on Zoom during the crisis. It was in a media shot issued by 10 downing st yesterday.

UK cabinet is about to find out what "zoom bombing" means the hard way...

Sounds like even more reason for Zoom to care. The more high profile they get the more like it is for EU privacy watchdogs to go after them.

is GDPR still in effect in UK?

OTOH if you’re making money from your product why trash it yourselves

Honest question [not trying to act controversial], especially with all the US-China spat.

Zoom's engineering team is based in China - the product is primarily built out of there. [1]

What guarantee is there that the CCP is not intercepting/backdooring all video communications? Especially in current situations, where so much sensitive information is being discussed via Zoom?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/26/zoom-key-profit-driver-ahead...

I really hate to mention this, but this perhaps answered an question of mine about why quality of code in Zoom is so low.

When I installed Zoom for Mac for the first time, I noticed it took a while to start up and caused beachballing. So I grabbed a sample of the process via Activity Monitor. To my utter horror, the Zoom binary is shelling out by calling system(3) on the fucking main thread.

I just verified this is the case on the latest version of Zoom for Mac. The binary zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/zmLoader.bundle/Contents/MacOS/zmLoader invokes system(3) on three separate occasions in two functions: -[ZPMBSystemHelper disablePTAutoRestoreWindow] and -[ZPMBSystemHelper disableConfAutoRestoreWindow].

And looking at what the string was, it's just a fucking call to defaults(1). Now I'm not a Mac programming expert but I cannot understand why Zoom needs to change its own preference settings this way. This just screams sloppy software engineering quality. I guess this is what you get when you outsource software engineering.

I would not be surprised at all if someone reports vulnerabilities in Zoom, whether deliberate or accidental.

Aaaaaaahhhh this is just so horrible. There is specific in-process C and Objective-C API for this. Someone should look at this app. Maybe I will if I finish up what I’m doing.

I don't know about code quality, and I'm not ruling out privacy or security issues, but zoom must be doing something very right -- their rise to popularity regardless of there being plenty of free (!) alternatives has to come from somewhere.

It may be just anecdotal but their calls work flawlessly, regardless of number of participants, where other apps are just a laggy mess. So yes, their apps are just a means to an end and may be rushed and "low quality", but oh boy do they deliver.

I've said this time and again only to get downvotes since there is no proof or substantiation about the CCP surveillance claims. But, it is an important to keep in mind. There are things that I cannot say due to our employment contract and NDA, but to say the least, we are looking into this matter.

Surveillance prospects, doesn't matter where they originate - US or China or Country X - need to be discussed and examined. But apparently, saying anything against China on HN is an automatic ban for creating a flame war. We've become too soft. Obviously personal attacks and racism is not tolerable. But, I would personally (some may disagree) say that we should also criticize bad parts of culture too...that's for another day or a different forum.

Can we just get past the my country your country bullshit on HN and talk about privacy implications especially from the world's largest surveillance network? It is one thing to be spied upon for advertisement tracking, an entirely another to be spied upon by a brutal authoritarian government. Fearlessly criticizing CCP or the NSA, or Israeli intelligence agency or whatever... should be one of the most important things to talk about on "Hacker" news forum.

I am gonna fire off some anon emails to WSJ/NYTimes/WaPo/Guardian to create some awareness and perhaps they can dig further into Chinese influence in using Zoom. I am deeply concerned. The entire world has given up video/audio/screen/application privacy in a snap... for the data might be stored in Tianjin datacenter, needless to say whose keys are in the hands of CCP - I guarantee that but cannot provide proof.

Edit: past comments that were downvoted (and flagged): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22657794

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22684767

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22663295

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22705960

I made a comment a few weeks ago criticizing the Chinese government[1]. No flame war came of it, it wasn't flagged, downvoted to oblivion, or result in an "automatic ban." I'm not sure what you're saying to cause those things to happen, but it doesn't seem to be what you think it is.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22490791

I am glad to hear. My perception is based on entire posts (not just comments) that were flagged due to extreme polarization of views. I can't find the thread but most comments that were anti-China were downvoted/flagged in that thread. I just have a general feeling, but I am glad to see your concerned voiced.

>There are things that I cannot say due to our employment contract and NDA, but to say the least, we are looking into this matter.

Who is "we"?

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

In case it's not clear, I'm with you. Either you're in a position to state in what capacity you work or you're not. In the latter, don't hint at it. Just leave that out. It's useless, and more likely to make people doubt the validity of the vague claim.

I have noticed there has been a lot more downvoting here recently, really innocuous and innocent things as well. It might just be more traffic or a different type of traffic to the site while everybody is staying home.

And while I agree with your sentiment regarding the CCP, the comments you link lack the meat of the one you just posted. I'm not surprised they got a kicking.

> I am gonna fire off some anon emails to WSJ/NYTimes/WaPo/Guardian to create some awareness

Well done.

Of course the CCP can intercept those videos, Snowden's book talked about how the NSA is doing what they are doing specifically because China was doing it.

It's not specific to Zoom, they intercept at the global fiber lines, they can watch ANY video they want.

So yes, the CCP can watch your videos and so can the NSA.

Zoom as a legal entity is a US company, headquartered in San Jose, California. So US law should apply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Video_Communications

For what reasons would spy organisations in other countries care about the laws in California or the US and following them?

The question "What guarantee is there that the CCP is not intercepting/backdooring all video communications?" from luminati was towards Zoom, not towards any other orgnization. You might want read the question more carefuly.

Not much. In particular, the fact that you sign up for accounts under company emails makes it much easier for them to selectively target based on which users look the juiciest. Even if the backdoor isn’t in the public code, it’s trivial to put in logic to have clients receive a different update when signed in with an account marked as “VIP” or whatever.

One major problem for Zoom is that it cannot merely focus on its core video conferencing competency while achieving the growth objectives of a publicly traded company. A high-quality video conferencing platform is hard to replicate until it isn't. The amount of talent and energy being spent right now on video conferencing, as a result of remote work, is going to amount to commoditization of high-quality video conferencing. Zoom has maybe another 12 months of juice left. As a result, it's advancing into new categories and will compete with customers very soon.

I'd be very cautious about sharing information with Zoom. You may be showing it where to fish.

How hard can it possibly be to replicate? Zoom walked into a market packed with established players and now they own the whole thing. That suggests the barriers to entry aren't so great.

I think the "high-quality video conferencing" is the "hard to replicate" portion. I've used a lot of different conferencing platform and consistently zoom has been: Relatively easy to use, high quality, reliable.

Those last two portions are super critical. No one wants to spend the first 10 minutes of their meeting fighting with their conferencing technology. Also no one wants to sound like robots.

With COVID19 and a ton more people working remote, will there be more competition coming into the space? Sure. But it will take them a lot of work, I'd think, to at least meet Zoom's quality and reliability... and do it either so much better or for so much cheaper to warrant change.

Own the whole thing? While I used zoom at my last job, I don't at my current one.

What does zoom do that something like Google Hangouts or Slack doesn't?

In my experience it has better reliability and quality, to the point where I haven't had to worry about it.

In 12 months, it won't matter if there are 10 other products offering a comparable service. Companies won't want to pay the cost of switching for something that's "just as good". It has to be 10x better to justify the switch. Consumers won't switch because everyone else will have Zoom. A videoconferencing app is only useful if both parties have it installed.

One of the things that are special about the video conferencing is how easy it is to switch compared to many other industries. You wont need a factor ten here.

Concur. Past employer switched out Zoom for other tech. The demand to switch conferencing provider was easy. The other tech was painful to use and much-complained about until everyone was told to shut up about it. So, "videoconferencing that doesn't suck" is still the barrier to entry.

So, you think it'll turn into a generalized software consulting company??

No. I think it will be a services provider operating within a "remote economy".

The paid version has a feature where the organization admins can listen and watch in conversations without anybody noticing or giving consent. I am quite sure that doing so would be illegal where I live (Germany).

I don't think that's true, source? At least I've never seen that as an Enterprise admin.

Based on some quick googling, are you perhaps mistaking Zoom the video conf software with the confusingly similarly named ZOOM International, which does call-center / agent software but is a completely unrelated and a much older company?

Zoom Admin here:

An admin, from a dashboard, can see all meetings currently running. If you "click" into one of those meetings for more details, you can also join the meeting as essentially a cohost, you cannot join invisibly.

You CAN see any meeting title, guests, duration, call quality, IP addresses of attendees, Geolocation of that IP, network ti Mic, Speaker and camera in use, and some other stuff.

YOU CAN see all recordings after the fact that are cloud-hosted, Zoom offers 2 recording types based on where you're recording from, laptops like Mac and PC with min spec can record locally, or in the cloud, everything else is in the cloud. I also do not know and do not believe, there is an audit log for this. This is actually the most troubling thing.

You can see more here https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/204654719-Getting-...

Also, unlike say Google Hangouts Meet, you cannot add a room to a meeting without consent. Meet allows you to force ANY room into any meeting you want (defaulting with camera and sound on). I've seen people who have these set up in their homes and think of how bad it can be.

EDIT-

Also while no one at my org uses it, I believe you can easily see all zoom chat history.

Citation required, cannot find this in the feature list, support documentation, or on the pricing page.

If you are looking for a source of these claims, let me give you one: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/what-you-should-know-a...

> Administrators also have the ability to join any call at any time on their organization’s instance of Zoom, without in-the-moment consent or warning for the attendees of the call.

that doesn't mention the `without noticing` part, which is the creepy not good part. sounds like it's just saying the administrators get a list of currently running meetings and can join them if they want without being invited. doesn't say they're hidden or anything.

well the article says admins can join "without warning" (i.e., without notice) and without consent. Although the article does not say whether the admin appears on the user list or not, lets assume the admin does show on the user list. Then, it seems in practice to be very well possible to join and attend the meeting without anyone noticing. I am certainly not constantly monitoring the current user list in my meetings, especially not in larger ones.

That's creeeeeeepy.

Unless you gave "consent" in your employment contract, or agreement to the companies employee handbook, AUP or similar documentation. This sort of "agreement to monitoring" is common in a lot of corporations today.

Please don't use your company issued hardware/software/network for something not-work related ... and something you wouldn't feel comfortable sharing with most of your colleagues. There is already a plethora of monitoring going on out there.

Not a lawyer, but being a Washington resident (see WA wiretapping laws) interviewing over Zoom (thus not working for that company and no having signed any forms/NDAs/waivers) I'm pretty sure someone snooping in or recording the interview without my consent is illegal.

This blame-the-victim mentality is not helpful. An employee shouldn't have to be vigilant against their bosses spying on them! Basic human norms don't disappear just because there's fine print in a contract. The idea that "ownership" of hardware gives certain people in a company unchecked power over the people who use that hardware is obscene.

Except this person doesnt seem to have been able to give informed consent, which is what German Law is actually looking for. European employment law is much more on the side of employees than in the US, where your comment's nihilism would make me guess you're located... Most GDPR infractions given have been around this exact sort of noncensensual recording and I think the GP comment should be contacting their data protection office or seeking guidance from their company CPO.

Yeah I hate ZOOM sooo much.

First there was the issue with them turning on the camera by default. At least you could turn that off. Then there was the spyware they installed on every Mac without even asking for consent. And now this...

Since the spyware thing I refuse to install their crap on my machine, but one of our suppliers still uses it and the web client is very choppy.. But they'll just have to put up with it. I'm never installing it again.

I also find their UI to be frustrating, especially the chat part of it. I have yet to find a way to make the chat more dense, every message seems to have an excess of white space. Also, at least with the company that I use it with, there's no obvious way to search message history.

Agreed. I find the whole experience to be horrible. Especially having to install some garbage executable rather than using my browser. It does nothing for me that Google Meet doesn't do better.

Yeah that's an issue with many 'modern' apps. MS Teams does the same :( I really preferred slack but now that MS throws Teams in for free we have to cope with that.

> First there was the issue with them turning on the camera by default.

FaceTime does this as well, even when I'm making a phone call via Contacts. I hate it.

Then press the button with a handset instead of the one with a camera; it's called "FaceTime Audio" for a reason.

If you had added them to Favourites and are calling from there, you added FaceTime (video) as the favourite; delete that shortcut and re-add them to Favourites as FaceTime Audio.

You're assuming I use FaceTime on a phone. I do not. To clarify, I'm describing the experience of using the Contacts app in MacOS 10.14.6 to place phone calls.

I get that privacy is important but this company has become a household name over night. My mom literally just installed Zoom because her friends were talking about it (eyeroll). The company has obviously helped the global economy work remotely and keep productivity moving over the past few months. First, thank you to Zoom for making a great product and continue to work under ridiculous load. Secondly, I agree that privacy is an issue but can we tone it down a bit considering the global situation at stake.

What am I missing? I'm asking humbly. Because it seems like we are complaining about the food at a homeless shelter?

> I agree that privacy is an issue but can we tone it down a bit considering the global situation at stake.

It seems to me that this is the best possible time to make some noise about Zoom's privacy problems. What better time for that could there be than during a period of mass adoption? What better opportunity to shame a company into compliance than during a global pandemic when the responsibilities of companies to the community is being emphasized?

You might have a point if castigating Zoom for spying on users somehow facilitated the spread of corona, but it doesn't.

At what time would it be acceptable to critique Zoom's surveillance practices, in your view? We're not allowed to complain when a useful tool also spies on us?

Not criticizing the timing. Criticizing the tone. My rule in life is politely ask first, if no response then by all means, bring the wrath. Does anyone know if they've ignored the concern?

Everybody assumes every company is a villain these days. Maybe this was an overlooking and they'll happily fix? Anybody ever think of that?

> Does anyone know if they've ignored the concern?

Well yes, an example is their reaction on their Zero Day:

https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-...

> Ultimately, Zoom failed at quickly confirming that the reported vulnerability actually existed and they failed at having a fix to the issue delivered to customers in a timely manner. An organization of this profile and with such a large user base should have been more proactive in protecting their users from attack.

1. Paid service 2. Privacy is important.

One thing I've noticed about it which rubs me the wrong way is that, on Linux, when I exit the application it keeps running in the background. There's no reason that it advertises why this should be necessary, and I don't see any option to disable it. I shouldn't have to manually kill the process to exit a program.

I agree this is annoying, but you can always Exit the program from the icon in the menubar (works for me on both GNOME and xfce).

I thought this was going to be about their hilarious CSP, which whitelists the following domains:

    'unsafe-eval'
    'unsafe-inline'
    blob:
    https://*.50million.club
    https://*.adroll.com
    https://*.cloudfront.net
    https://*.google.com
    https://*.hotjar.com
    https://*.zoom.us
    https://*.zoomus.cn
    https://*.zopim.com
    https://ad.lkqd.net
    https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com
    https://apiurl.org
    https://appsforoffice.microsoft.com
    https://assets.zendesk.com
    https://bat.bing.com
    https://cdn.5bong.com
    https://cdn.jsdelivr.net
    https://cdncache-a.akamaihd.net
    https://code.jquery.com
    https://connect.facebook.net
    https://consent.trustarc.com
    https://extnetcool.com
    https://fp166.digitaloptout.com
    https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net
    https://intljs.rmtag.com
    https://pi.pardot.com
    https://px.ads.linkedin.com
    https://ruanshi2.8686c.com
    https://rum-static.pingdom.net
    https://s.dcbap.com
    https://s.yimg.com
    https://s.ytimg.com
    https://s3.amazonaws.com
    https://scout-cdn.salesloft.com
    https://sealserver.trustwave.com
    https://secure-cdn.mplxtms.com
    https://secure.myshopcouponmac.com
    https://snap.licdn.com
    https://sp.analytics.yahoo.com
    https://srvvtrk.com
    https://static.zdassets.com
    https://static2.sharepointonline.com
    https://tag.demandbase.com
    https://tpc.googlesyndication.com
    https://tracking.g2crowd.com
    https://translate.googleapis.com
    https://trk.techtarget.com
    https://unpkg.com
    https://www.comeet.co
    https://www.dropbox.com
    https://www.google-analytics.com
    https://www.googleadservices.com
    https://www.googletagmanager.com
    https://www.gstatic.com
    https://www.youtube.com
    https://d.adroll.mgr.consensu.org
    https://serve2.cheqzone.com
    https://static.ada.support
    'self'

via: https://twitter.com/jasvir/status/1242518507683639296

Yes unpkg and s3, anyone can get content up on them.

Zoom have had several controversies with its privacy now and still going strong . Great staying power like Facebook.

The product must be really good. I have never used them more than in couple occasions and found it like any other web conferencing tool in my opinion.

Truth is, it has the best video quality I've seen out of any of the video conferencing tools out there by a mile. Only Facetime comes close and it's limited to apple hardware and has more limited screen collaboration tools.

As a result, they're going to have staying power.

Maybe I'm biased but video quality doesn't really bother me nearly as much as audio quality, and Zoom kinda sucks there. Part of it is the codec, but their AEC is so godawful we have to force everyone on calls to use headphones.

Video quality is really only necessary when screen sharing, and zoom does OK there.

> AEC

I haven't heard this abbreviation before but I assume it means Audio Echoing Cancellation.

Can’t tell the difference between zoom and slack in terms of video quality. Both are perfect.

Did you know they also make a public address book in your entire organization of people on zoom? You can't easily opt out of this. I'm currently contracted at a govt organization which other than mundane conference calls you have to reserve a spot for by email (which nobody does because it's not 1998) doesn't have any remote video/audio infrastructure so basically each team is doing their own thing. Some use zoom, others discord and so forth. A lot of teams started to use zoom and they sign up with their @xyz.gov e-mail. Literally everyone is then public to everyone on @xyz.gov and whether they're currently in a call.

Everyone is still on the free plan and reconnecting after 40 minutes (it's basically standard procedure when the 10 minute countdown starts to rejoin). I bet it won't take long before zoom sales get in touch and you think the person going to approve the tailor-made $$$ contract cares about privacy? Or the 700 people already using it except for a small minority who don't have any influence in this kind of decision making?

Is Zoom-dissing just in fashion these days? In the last few days I've seen these on HN:

- Having the Facebook SDK installed in their iOS app, which sends user data to Facebook even if the user has no Facebook account

- Having a setting, that's off by default, that lets other callers see whether you have the Zoom app in focus

- Having a general "accessibility over security" engineering attitude, which led them to eg shipping their desktop apps with a builtin HTTP server (and with it a much bigger security surface area), just to skip one extra step in the join-meeting-via-a-zoom-link-flow. They removed it after a backlash, but the engineering attitude probably didn't change.

Now, I agree that all of these are bad. It's OK for outrage to happen over these things, every single one of them are shit and major companies like Zoom need to get their act together.

But I also think that many apps out there do stuff like this. The majority of popular apps, I'd wager. Why is Zoom being singled out? First Vice, now a Harvard blog, a bunch of unsubstantiated tweet storms.. Is it just, en vogue to diss Zoom somehow?

You are right that many pieces of software infringe on privacy. However, Zoom only recently has become one of the most widespread of these and because of that has only recently begun to affect a significant portion of the population, hence why it is newsworthy.

I think this also has to do with the fact that Zoom is being used for work and school and therefore people have less choice over their use of it. It's not a social network that many people have chosen to start using, it's a piece of software that millions of students and other people are being required to use without consideration of privacy.

> Why is Zoom being singled out?

There is no conspiracy here, calm down. Zoom is popular, therefore people talk about it.

Is Zoom the best though? Google Hangouts seems to be just as good.

Try it at 12 people.

Try it when you want to control who is speaking and when.

Try it when you want to co-ordinate hundreds of participants and still want to track who has a question so you can hand the virtual mic / airtime to them.

Try it when you want breakout groups and to determine who is in which group, and after a set time for the groups to return to the main space.

What is good enough for 2 people facing each other, and appears to work perfectly well for a group of 5 or 6... doesn't quite scale to a company all-hands, or giving a lecture or seminar.

Tools fit a scale, and Zoom is excessive for the small and simple use-case but excels at the large and complex.

Which is a long way of saying that Zoom is one the few companies that has been around long enough to deal with all the edge cases. Throw a few devs in a room for a bit and you'll get a perfectly usable video chat for 1-1 or a small group, but you won't get Zoom.

Wikipedia says Zoom was founded in 2011. Google Hangouts has been around for about the same amount of time, and Skype predates them by quite a bit.

I don't quite understand why Hangouts and Skype aren't more robust than they are. I'm sure this is indeed a hard problem, but the utility of getting it right is obvious, and these are massive companies.

I appreciate listing the areas in which Zoom beats competitors. It helps people understand where work should be done on alternatives.

My company has been remote-only for about 1.5 weeks now and we have 4 different conferencing systems that people are using. It's interesting that everyone has their preferences, but for small meetings nobody is using Zoom as far as I've seen.

Be aware that allowing everybody to continue following their preferences will result in the same proliferation that you see with text editors, email clients, and programming languages. Based on having only 4 different systems, I might predict that your company size is ~100-200 people (though that's a napkin estimate based on a single integer). There are at least 10 systems available, and certainly many more that are only accessible to technical people.

Try it at 600 people, with at least 50 unmuted. (Not a made up example. Zoom worked, last week, for us.)

We just used it at work with 500+ people. After all the various teleconferencing crap we paid $$$ for, we couldn't use them because they couldn't handle it. Zoom worked flawlessly.

For me, zoom consistently has far better A/V quality than hangouts.

So we have two anecdotes now I guess.

I tried Google Hangouts on Firefox on Linux but couldn't get it to work at all. It just errored out before starting the call.

I can’t say what happened there (Hangouts works fine for me in Firefox), but Zoom won’t let you use Firefox at all if you want audio.

I've been using Firefox on Fedora for both Zoom and Hangouts for at least two years. No problems.

Slack, on the other hand, can go to hell.

? I'm literally on a zoom conference in firefox with audio right now.

They just (like yesterday) fixed a bug that prevented Meet from working in Firefox in some cases, such as when privacy.resistFingerprinting was set to true. Give it another go.

I just tried and it does seem to be working now.

Ah yes, in my case it doesn't agree with firefox at all. I have chrome installed pretty much for hangouts only.

They just (like yesterday) fixed a bug that prevented Meet from working in Firefox in some cases, such as when privacy.resistFingerprinting was set to true. Give it another go.

I use both at work, and Hangouts has less features and struggles more noticeably with bad connections. I consider Hangouts worse

"Seems". Some people reported that Zoom handle gracefully more participants than Hangouts and performs better on a slow connection, see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15717701 and this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16155155

There are probably a couple of others you can find here and there.

Edit: Well, this thread also.

My experience with google hangouts over the years has been that it's a poorly made product. It does work "ok" for 1-1 but the video quality would frequently drop or not connect at all. Zoom just "works".

I like Hangouts overall, but the killer feature that's missing is a good gallery view where I can see more than 4-6 participants at a time. Zoom is really good at this.

Everyone mentions Jitsi on HN but I'm guessing AV quality isn't as good as Zooms...

Jitsi is nice for just video chat with a few participants (I use it where possible). Zoom is the more polished product, with more features and better scaling (Zoom calls with 90 attendees just work in my experience, I'd not trust Jitsi with that)

I am always very hesitant to say anything personal over any video chat medium unless I know it's end to end encrypted. I know that they're not actively watching my video meetings, but it's still causing a chilling effect in how I conduct myself with their service.

Zoom works in China, ergo it is being recorded and analyzed. Automatic voice transcription is a thing.

I just realized this yesterday when Zooming with someone in China w/o a VPN.

And here it is:

https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...

What are some end-to-end encrypted video chat apps? I know Signal offers it but only has one on one calls.

Clearly they don’t “need” to do a thing. They were already gaining a ton of market share before COVID19, and this has only cemented their position.

The people who are concerned about privacy aren’t really the ones writing them big checks anyway.

Title is sort of incorrect: "Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act" should be "Zoom needs not to do stupid shit"...

I'm a fan of the product but this is ridiculous behavior (great Linux support). I have a hard time imagining the product meeting in which "Yes. That's a good idea. Let's do it." was said. I get that FB is big, that Zoom wants the credibility, etc but that's a sign that management is not thinking clearly about their product and should be a red flag to any investor (among the many green flags from current demand)...

You realize investors are laughing their way to the bank because of the ease of use focus of zoom? The investors in the fully encrypted privacy based video conferencing platforms (yes, they exist) are broke now.

Use case: Mediation

Zoom is the only easy to use videoconferencing tool I have found that can do breakout rooms. Mediation is, by law, a confidential process.

From the ConsumerReports article: "Videos aren't off-limits, according to the document, and neither are transcripts that can be generated automatically, the documents you share on your screen, or the names of everyone on a call."

In recommending that my clients use Zoom, am I violating my ethical and legal requirements? Is Zoom breaking the law?

I think people are missing the fact that ZOOM doesn't actually clean up its act. It has lots to profit from selling user data.

Note also at least the unwanted/unnecessary facebook connection: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/k7e599/zoom-ios-app-sends...

I am using zoom for school with 300 students and it works great. My professors who are not tech savvy were able to use it without problem. Zoom makes recording, screen sharing and chatting much easier than other softwares. Also, I like how easy it is to call in.

Also, at my work we use zoom for everything. It is a powerful software that we love.

We have been using Zoom four 4 years now. And it has simplified conferences enormously. Sometimes a few of our customers insist on using their own corporate mandated systems. Half of these times there is a struggle to get the meeting going for one reason or the other. We offer to set up a zoom call and, quite literally, the call is back on track within 2 minutes. Regardless of which country the user is in, the device being used, or any other parameter which somehow seems to trip up all the other systems regularly.

I have used Skype, webex, hangout meet, gotomeeting, various other entirely web based ones and none come close to the reliability that Zoom provides. No wonder it's getting adopted like crazy.

Kudos to them for handling this traffic with absolutely no visible hiccups.

Zoom should really come out with a public statement (does one exist?). They've been called out a number of times over the past week or few and I think it would be wise for them to clear up any misconceptions (or hide in a turtle shell if they are clearly screwed either way)

It's a necessary evil for many of us students. Institutions just aren't willing to deal with compatibility/pricing issues with such short notice. Zoom found its niche as a bootstrap crisis averter, I guess

This post inspired me to actually try out Jitsi but was put off by their request for access to my Youtube profile when the prompt was "connect your google calendar". WTF?

Anyone know what that permission is even about?

Do Zoom have their own infrastructure or do they run on aws/azure/gcloud?

I think it's amazing how zoom became so popular recently. It's even been approved to be used for Passover Seder dinner by some Rabbis :)

It also very popular in academia and reminds me of Dropbox. When I was a student everyone around me used Dropbox. They developed a great product which competes with Google and other giants. But those were all unpaid users and eventually Dropbox moved their focus to Enterprise. Zoom will soon be in a similar situation.

I had the same question... It looks like they use AWS, though this paper I found is dated May 2013...

https://d24cgw3uvb9a9h.cloudfront.net/static/40580/doc/Zoom-...

"the best of those, Zoom, is doing very well"

Is Zoom really the best? No other comparable platform out there?

Anyone know how difficult it would be to build something like it on top of aws or a similar cloud?

I used to work in videoconferencing, and Zoom seemingly came out of nowhere and everybody loved it, because people overwhelmingly said it really is the best.

In terms of actual reliable video/audio experience. When evaluating platforms, other videoconferencing solutions simply suffered quality issues more -- taking longer to start, glitches, latency, pausing, echo, and so on.

Also, the hard part isn't building 1-1 video chat. It's having it work with 20 or 200 separate participants.

I have no idea why they're better except that building reliable audio-video at scale turns out to be a really hard problem, and they seemed to focus their engineering on that specifically.

Kind of like file sync was really unreliable until Dropbox decided to focus on building a sync tool that actually "just worked". Same philosophy. Zoom is the Dropbox of videoconferencing.

"Zoom is the Dropbox of videoconferencing" weird I had the exact same thought yesterday and it even translates to everyone thinking they can build it themselves with gluing tools x,y,z together!

> Anyone know how difficult it would be to build something like it

Companies have been trying to build the perfect video chat system for about 30 years. Companies with tens of billions of dollars in cash and more in stock. Almost all of them suck in various ways.

You can stream one audio+video to one person, and you can stream it to multiple people. But then do multiple duplex audio+video streams to multiple people, on multiple platforms, with low CPU, memory, and bandwidth requirements, with user controls, recording, chat, screen sharing, drawing, and 50 other features. Get 49 of them right, and the 50th feature will suck, and your users will hate it and be ready to move to a different product. I think it's one of the most complex user applications that exists.

I've been playing around with jitsi (https://jitsi.org/) and have been impressed. I may play around with deploying their server on aws this weekend (via this docker, most likely: https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet)

A while ago I remembered reading that a typical video conferencing/streaming setup on AWS has astronomical costs. I don't remember exactly which AWS services were used in the estimate but it seemed very prohibitive for startups.

Yeah it's high bandwidth out (egress costs) and video processing is expensive, whether CPU (more cores * more time) or GPU (expensive instances). You basically have to process every input camera stream in real time to generate miniatures and do change detection (although at a lower frame rate, which you can signal to the client, so rate/resolution scaling is done client-side). VAD (voice activity detection) is client side, one mixer per output stream on the server -- not too bad. Video decode, mixing and H.265 encoding is expensive, but saves on transmission bandwidth.

Then consider that contention is terrible for real time and you would want dedicated instances.

I don't know the zoom architecture, but I doubt they could scale so fast without lots of cloud. I think they have an enormous bill, which they are using capital to pay for because they are becoming a household name.

Web RTC pretty much handles peer to peer video chat. I think you just need a server to organize the call’s, provide chat, and login from

Peer 2 peer doesn't scale for video conferencing with many users. Jitsi only does it for two participants. Everything larger has to go through the server.

Why doesn't it scale? Because for n participants, each would need n-1 connections?

P2P video for large groups is dead over the public internet because you don't get the network's help in doing 1-many delivery.

Can someone explain the advantages of Zoom over a FOSS solution lake Jitsi Meet? https://meet.jit.si/

Institutional buy-in and support. When your 40,000 student university's administration declares "we are using Zoom for online classes and it's been integrated into our class management system by IT", it just gets used.

And that university chooses to use Zoom over another solution for many reason - after-sales support, SLAs for performance and availability, pre-written API integrations for their CMS and student ID system, guarantees from their sales team about regulatory compliance, and the like.

I've been using zoom for more than a three years now, and I want to know if Zoom is providing transcripts of private 1 on 1 conversations to the room owner.

Just to clarify - the zoom room is not mine. We are using it across a group of like 10, for a group meetings - sometimes all of us, sometimes subgroups, sometimes one on one.

I can not imagine a world where a company would do that, but given the recent events, I am not ruling out this level of creepines.

Zoom?

The case of #poorjennifer calls for major concerns. Every woman should feel safe using Zoom for work, never worry about privacy violation, such as manager videotaping her without her consent, then saving recordings in zoom cloud without her knowledge. Zoom videotaping goes against Privacy Law in California. Consent is diligently required.

K-12 education uses zoom because it's HIPAA and FERPA compliant. My understanding is that Skype and Hangouts aren't.

> Zoom has an extremely valuable service, which it performs very well—better than anybody else, apparently.

Objection - best advertised (or should I say "best" advertised) doesn't equal best. I'd be truly surprised if somebody actually presented convincing arguments that Zoom service is better than anybody else.

I experienced the switch from Webex to Zoom in a corporate office environment and being able to see your meeting on the iPad and clicking start is a huge win. And if you’re in any room you can just connect because it knows where you are.

Webex addresses are stupid by comparison.

I don’t like this Facebook crap but otherwise Zoom is pretty slick.

I am very curious about Zoom’s desktop version as I have seen it used for sensitive telemedicine sessions between doctors and court ordered patients. I think Facebook’s response was disgraceful, putting the onus and blame on the developer after FB developed a plug-in which is no different than malware.

Probably ninja'd, but it looks like Zoom cleared this up:

https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/z3b745/zoom-removes-code-...

If anybody else is wondering about alternatives, DHH sourced some ethical options in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1243248363979419649?s=21

Of those, I tried whereby.com yesterday and was blown away. It just works with zero downloads in any browser, including mobile, and is very high quality. From my brief usage, I highly recommend it for small teams.

If your answer to a privacy concern is "use a Google product" you may not quite understand Google's business model.

Zoom is as good as video can be in 2020. Google may be on parity, but tools like WebX are laughably inferior.

Zoom Removes Code That Sends Data to Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708233

Where did Zoom suddenly come from? I never even heard of it until this quarantine stuff, then all of the sudden everyone is talking about videochat on Zoom.

It's like WTF, another contender for this throne? Sigh.

Are there any advantages to Zoom over Jitsi Meet? For most people's use case (a small group of family friends) the simplicity and quality of the Jitsi Meet setup is incredible.

As it's beginning to look like my days as a Zoom refusenik are numbered, what is the safest way to use it? Android, iOS, Chomebook, some form of virtualization or container?

I run it, along with other sketchy garbage proprietary software for wook, in a QEMU VM. Or I just dial in and let people suffer through me being on a phone connection owing to their choice of software.

On a disposable laptop on an isolated subnet. Then burn it after use.

I don't know if it can. Its always bound by its government. By that measure I am really surprised people in large companies trust it. I really am surprised by its adoption.

Does any one have any knowledge at how Zoom is architected? I know they own some datacenters, but so does Microsoft, which has a worse service than Zoom.

An overview is given in their blog post: https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2019/06/26/zoom-can-provide-i...

However, I would also like to know if there's more to it. Do they do any server side transcoding? Do they get an advantage by having multiple backend servers connected through good links, having clients connected to the nearest one and routing efficiently through their network? It appears that they use(d) H264 as their codec, are there some technical tricks they use to cope with variable bandwidth (do they use scalable video coding or simulcast)?

For a piece of software that initially made claims to having encryption and privacy concerns, yes, yes they do.

Not just Zoom, basically every company.

Wow, hackernews is a cesspool of self-serving "intellectuals". We're in the middle of a pandemic, which already killed 27 thousands people. And the #1 post is privacy act? Can't you guys admit that you didn't come up with video calling company worth 37 Billion dollars. Maybe it's worth talking the positive impact on Zoom during this crisis.

“This company is doing incredibly shady things and exploiting its sudden boost in popularity, so you guys shouldn’t criticise it, because it’s made soooo much money and you didn’t and it’s therefore above criticism “

That’s how your comment reads. The fact that it’s worth so much is almost completely irrelevant, and if anything, should mean they have more responsibility to do the right thing.

It's a matter priority.

If it's a real problem, go sue them. Do you need a Havard op ed to tell you?

Coincidentally NextDNS blocked my use of the Harvard site for bad ad tracking. Hmmm.

Of all things, lack of trust and transparency from a video platform is pretty scary. Hard to justify using Zoom any longer. Lifesize is a good alternative that a lot of people don't know about (I have no stake in them, but have used it before).

I have the feeling that outside of the HN community and other tech communities, most people just don't care about this, which is sad.

Where is the Zoom CEO in this thread?

broken link?

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RxLbT_L...

It works really well.

One that has been a total game changer for my company is when I'm hosting a conference call, I can simply "Invite by Phone" my participants. They get a phone call, are prompted to "Press 1 to enter the conference", and boom they're in. It's drastically reduced people fumbling around with phone numbers + participant codes, ending up in the wrong meeting, or getting stuck in some unnecessary software install loop. If someone is more than two minutes late, they're getting a phone call that brings them instantly into the meeting.

Also a really nice feature, again for phone conferences, is when people dial-in I see their phone number handle in the UI. But during the call as they introduce themselves or I look up their number, I can then rename their user to something recognizable. Now if I'm on a call with 5 people at another firm, I appear really impressive because I know who each person is by their name. When someone is speaking on the conference call, their icon lights up. If someone has a ton of background noise I can easily mute them.

Zoom Phone (addl paid feature) is awesome too. Virtual phone numbers, IVR, call routing, busy hours, I can instantly turn a 1:1 conversation into a zoom meeting that other people can join, etc. Zoom Phone works on my iphone like a regular dialer, and I can place/receive fully digital calls on it (pretty similar to how Google Voice works), so it doesn't matter if I have actual cell service.

I've never used Microsoft Teams, and does look really snazzy, but Zoom is an absolute joy to use compared to every single other conferencing software I have ever used. The video chat and screensharing is fast and responsive and just works exactly like you would expect it to.

Having used zoom, teams, skype for business, webex, and many others ... zoom is the only one of these which just works. I'm on the con calls typically 5+ hours a day. Yes, it is soul crushing.

Teams sorta works, though it often messes up with devices. Headsets and speakers (I've got a Jabra speak 710). Often times it handles contention badly.

Skype ... yeah. The less said the better.

Webex. Must be marketing for Zoom and others, given how unreservedly horrible the UX is.

I've also used uberconference some years ago. Almost as good as zoom.

I am looking at containerized ways to run zoom to restrict its access to my system, but it is the best IMO, by far.

[edit] I should note that I've also used Viber a bit. Less now though. Mostly for calling home from overseas. Not great for conferencing though.

Zoom also has a good Linux client. It's been the least frictive option amongst the well-known conferencing apps with clients for me.

Teams is way better than Skype, provided everyone is on a computer.

> It works really well.

Does it?

Asking because I just left a zoom meeting with horrible sound quality and extremely bad video quality. Why would anyone prefer that to Teams is beyond me.

Edit: interesting this is _heavily_ downvoted. Can't a person have a bad experience and tell HN about it?

> Can't a person have a bad experience and tell HN about it?

Not necessarily, no. It's downvoted because it's one low-evidence anecdote amidst comments from people who've been using it daily (two years, here). That doesn't mean it didn't happen, but without supporting evidence it's difficult to find relevance in a single poor call.

Some basic evidentiary questions for you to consider, that would help distinguish between "someone's Internet was broken" (more likely) and "Zoom is defective" (less likely), for example:

1) Was only one participant experiencing issues, or were all participants blurry? Did Zoom warn you that of connection instability? Did Zoom show yellow or red connection status bars for the affected participant(s)?

2) Does your (or their) Internet connection show instability such as high latency (Bufferbloat) when performing a speed test capable of measuring and reporting latency-under-load fluctuations? https://dslreports.com/speedtest

3) Did the sound quality issue involving one or more participants who were not using in-ear or over-ear headphones?

4) Was the sound quality issue reproducible in a followup call for testing? Was it reproducible using "call in by phone" audio rather than "internet" audio for testing?

EDIT:

5) If you stop sharing your video, does the problem improve? If you activate screen sharing, does the problem worsen?

I have about a year of near daily anecdotal evidence to the contrary. So, in my experience, yes it works extremely well. I'm not saying it's better than Teams at all, I've never used that, and it looks pretty awesome from their marketing page. Microsoft has really stepped up their software quality game recently.

I can say Zoom is way the hell better than: Slack/Screenhero, TeamViewer, join.me, GoToMeeting, WebEx, Skype, Google Hangouts, BlueJeans, ugh the list goes on over the past years.

Zoom tells me I have no audio devices and need to reboot every time I launch it. I ignore the message and it magically works fine. Great piece of software /s

Another pretty great thing with Zoom is that it'll keep a call up even if, say, your home internet drops out and you switch to tethering on your phone. It sounds rare, but with Australian internet or dodgy campus wifi, this is a really useful feature.

Well I think this a standard feature of conference call software, you can quit and re-join at any time.

Yes we transitioned from Webex + Lync + Skype + Cisco phones to just Zoom and it is amazing (aside from privacy breaches of course). Conferencing is a pain and Zoom solves a lot of existing issue in that area so companies recognize this, especially when people in change also use conference software :) .

I believe Zoom Phone is a whitelabel of RingCentral

They do have a partership. I know RingCentral whilelabels Zoom for video, so maybe vice versa for phone.

https://www.ringcentral.com/whyringcentral/company/pressrele...

Their About Us page makes no mention whatsoever of technology. There is no CTO, no VP Engineering, etc. Quite odd. If they were relabeling something else, that could explain it.

Zoom Phone has been a game changer.

1 of the 2 big cell phone networks we have: Rogers, is regularly failing to connect calls during peak hours for the past week. Being able to do digital calls has changed a lot, and probably took a load off their network.

(I say 2 big networks because Bell and Telus share tower infrastructure, Dunno where it separates out again, possibly just billing.)

(This subthread was originally in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703219)

Honestly UberConference works way better...

Absolutely not! We pay for both. Uberconference has higher latency (test with a click track inside your office with two phones on a call).

Contention on uberconference is MUCH worse when two people are speaking. You get that weird halting sorry I spoke on top of you effect.

Yep. It just works. First time use is nearly instant.

WebEx always took a while to on-board.

Jitsi Meet has this feature

>One that has been a total game changer for my company is when I'm hosting a conference call, I can simply "Invite by Phone" my participants. They get a phone call, are prompted to "Press 1 to enter the conference", and boom they're in. It's drastically reduced people fumbling around with phone numbers + participant codes, ending up in the wrong meeting, or getting stuck in some unnecessary software install loop. If someone is more than two minutes late, they're getting a phone call that brings them instantly into the meeting.

Why on earth are people needing to make POTS phone calls to join a meeting? Not only is the audio of vastly inferior quality, the information isn't being kept secure AND they can't see anything being presented.

Instead, why not shoot them a link so they can just click it and be in the meeting? That's how it SHOULD work, but that's not how it DOES work with Zoom (unless you engage in tomfoolery to make like you're trying but failing to install the software, and only then do you get a link to join via browser — but then then you get a deliberately-crippled experience because fuck you).

I’ve found Jitsi to be more than adequate with no need to download an app onto my computer. Just share the link with my friends!

I've tried it yesterday with some friends and in my opinion it's not ready for any serious use. The chat feature looks clunky and sometimes messages don't send on first try, especially the drawing board. Sometimes emojis you send in chat get plastered in the top right corner in about 10 times the size and stay there. I've also had the video feed and all controls disappear in the middle of a live session and the only fix was to close the app and sign-in via invite link. Still happy that something like this exists. Just needs a little bit of polish.

I used it for a meetup to convene remotely and it worked with maybe 6 or 7 people total. Also used it for movie night with some friends. Worked both times. So idk if I agree it's not ready for serious use (we might have different definitions of serious).

Agree. The big issue is that non-tech people can use zoom. With Jitsi (which I hope to eventually use mostly), you have to be someone who's willing to fool with it a bit to make it work.

If some of you 10x programmers would go on a Mission from God and get it going that would be super cool.

In what way do you have to fool with this? https://meet.jit.si/

It is quite possibly the simplest videoconferencing I have ever experienced (Google Hangouts, BlueJeans, Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams being my experience.) I like the Teams experience but the simplicity of just copying an URL from that Jitsi Meet page and having it work within a minute of 5 elderly non-technophile users receiving it in their emails is incredible.

> I’ve found Jitsi to be more than adequate

Just looked it up. Seems to be Chrome only. As a Safari and Firefox user, that ends my decision-making tree with two clicks.

They are working on it: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758. Unfortunately, I think WebRTC support is still not 100% uniform across browsers (there seem to be a range of browser-specific behaviour and bugs), making it hard to easily support all browsers. And Chrome appears to be the browser which implements new WebRTC features the fastest, so I can understand Jitsi Meet focusing their efforts on that platform.

You don't need chrome though, chromium should be enough.

On Linux it (obviously) also works on chromium, perhaps it also works on the new Edge? FF would be nice though.

Worked on Firefox on Linux for me.

Too little, too late. Corporations cannot be trusted with software.

harvard needs to pay their food service workers

Think twice before using Zoom. They have a lot of engineers in China developing the core technology. You would be foolish to conduct meetings and share sensitive docs over zoom. Communist party is listening to everything.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/26/zoom-key-profit-driver-ahead...

Zoom was developed in China

Look at the top of page 21 of their sec submission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1585521/000119312519...

Zoom needs to fuck off. This is apologism. We need open source and decentralized solution and we need to shut up. I'm tired of this.

Oh yea, I know that there are technical difficulties considering the decentralization. But why aren't we working on it now? Dunno what we're waiting for. Mass adoption?

I've been using Jitsi Meet

https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/

Thx! Heard about it already. I'll do a personal analysis and I'll report.

Their branding sucks. Their website / landing page sucks. Their UX / UI sucks. I like the technology behind it though. I'll try to contact someone to see whether I can work for them (with them) for free, or as a volunteer (UI / UX / Web & Product Designer). They deserve better. There's a chance!

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