Fraudulent is the word i would use.
insert Hanlons razor quote here
Being incompetent has nothing to do with the size or prominence of the company. Big/prominent companies fuck up/are sloppy all the time.
Their intention was to deceive users that the communication was encrypted, when in reality it wasn't.
I'm in no way saying it's impossible that Zoom did say E2E encryption while knowing that's not true, but I could imagine a scenario where a security person says "Yeah, we're encrypting connections to our backend" and a marketing person researching E2E and then saying to themselves "Yeah, sounds like we're doing E2E, let's write that", because this stuff happens all the time in the industry.
> Their intention was to deceive users
You sound so sure about their intentions, do you have any actual proof of this that others are missing? Again, I'm not saying it's impossible that their intention was to deceive users, but as an engineer, I always favor proof over guessing.
But just because someone uses a word wrong doesn't give you any proof about their intentions. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767447 for further elaboration on that point.
Again, it's harmful to use words incorrectly, _especially_ when it comes to E2E, so they should rightly get flak for getting it wrong. You all seem to be so sure that it was intentional though, while I've seen the same problem so many times before in the industry without it being intentional. If you do have proof it's intentional, please share it with the rest of us so we can be on the same page.