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Comment by shrew | Hacker News Reader

Since all the lockdowns and social distancing rules have come into play for COVID-19, Zoom has seen a huge increase in consumer usage. That in turn has lead to increased scrutiny as more people use it.

Besides that, this certainly isn't the first time Zoom's shady practices have been exposed, where many other conferencing products haven't had such a track record.

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What about using one of the many conferencing services that run from your browser?

Zoom has been repeatedly breaking the trust of their users - it's a clear pattern that won't change.

Isn't Zoom also one of the many conferencing services that run from your browser?

They use dark pattern to hide that: You'll have to cancel their attempt to open/download (one of that, don't remember) the native app three times before the link appears.

>Zoom has seen a huge increase in consumer usage.

Moreso than others? I deal with customers/partners all the time, and I count the following desktop clients installed on my laptop:

- Zoom - GoToMeeting - BlueJeans - Skype for Business - WebEx - Join.me

Also:

- Teams - Slack - Hangout Meet

And I'm probably missing a bunch. Is Zoom that much bigger?

Yes, Zoom has recently been adopted by local non-business groups across the world. Anecdotally, my wife's momgroups have Zoom now, and she's also using it with her own family. None of the alternatives are even close to good comparatively in ease-of-use and stability.

Ah. Makes sense. I deal mostly with businesses, and Zoom, from my anecdotal experience, is a minor player there.

In mid-2019 Zoom was only behind Cisco WebEx: https://www.ciodive.com/news/zooms-rise-carving-market-share...

Now it is the market leader. Hence all the bad P.R. Zoom's CEO was the head engineer for WebEx.

Also public, profitable.

Ease of use that came from bending platform rules.

you know what is more important than platform rules ? satisfying consumers. Remember that tech is made for humans before everything else !

e.g., if a majority (or even strong minority) of people in a country bends a rule, you change the rule to accommodate people, you don't put 30% of your population in jail. If zoom was a country, it would be the ~10th european country by population, you can't just ignore that.

In this case they were breaking security rules. The main people that accommodates is hackers.

which rule is being broken here ?

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