Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshuaissac | Hacker News Reader

> Audited data privacy is a core selling point of enterprise communication systems like Slack and Zoom

Is Zoom audited? Zoom had been lying for about having end-to-end encryption, for example, until they were caught by the US Federal Trade Commission. Surely, something like that would have been discovered earlier in an audit, if they were audited and the audits were worth something.

They were also sending data to third parties like Facebook and Google through their SDKs.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/zoom-lied-to-use...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/zoom-to-pay-85m-...

View on HN

They also kept microfone on after closing calls, and reverted after getting caught https://thinksproutinfotech.com/news/zoom-update-fixes-macos...

this was definitely a thing in windows too although no idea if changed now - I remember zoom running in the tray would cause the microphone to activate even outside of calls. I was weirded out by it enough to stop running zoom on startup and eventually replace zoom with other applications that didn't exhibit that behaviour.

Seriously, who in their right mind is using Zoom at this point? They've been "accidentally" collecting people's data, disclosing people's data to others, and have been caught lying so many times there's nearly zero chance that it's just total incompetence and even if it were, why use something made by people who are that bad at their job?

There are so many alternatives, how is it Zoom has any business at all?

> how is it Zoom has any business at all?

Zoom was the first videoconferencing software I experienced where the first 15 minutes of the meeting was not spent with "can you see me," "can you hear me," some people falling back to dialing in to a speakerphone, and one or more out-of-band calls to various participants to troubleshoot problems.

Zoom was click a link. And it worked. Nobody cared much about anything else beyond that.

Perhaps I am misremembering but I remember using Skype 9-10 years ago without any issues. Zoom does not seem to be that much of an improvement in terms of ease of use

But is Skype that way now? Zoom was in good position when the pandemic made everyone pick a video conferencing app. Some of the competition (Webex comes to mind) got slapped so hard they basically copied the Zoom interface in order to stay somewhat competitive.

This morning my boss tried to host a meeting on his favorite Zoom substitute. The first 20 minutes were spent trying to fix a ten second delay in his audio. Finally we just switched to a Zoom call, and it worked flawlessly.

There are only two videoconferencing platforms I've never had any problems with: Zoom and Google Meet. I don't trust either company, but sometimes you just have to get your work done.

> Is Zoom audited?

Yes. https://explore.zoom.us/en/trust/legal-compliance/

Where does it say that the code was audited? And where does it say who did it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com