Video Conferencing app ‘Zoom’ has made it official that it will not offer end-to-end encryption to its free users as offering ciphered communication will hinder its cooperation with the police. However, all paid users are offered an advantage of encrypted communication as per the press update released by Eric Yuan, the company CEO.
Genie Gebhard, a privacy advocate and the research director at Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized severely the update announced by the Zoom CEO for non-paying zoom users terming it as ‘Unfair’.
Likewise, Pat Walshe, a privacy expert tweeted the new Zoom’s policy as ‘Bizarre’ as it gives the law enforcement a back-door to conduct espionage.
From early this year, Zoom meetings and Zoom video calls are coming under immense backlash as they are being interrupted by C-Porn. In May 2020, Zoom CEO announced that a new version of Zoom 5.0 will be available by the month-end fixing all security and privacy-related risks discovered by some security experts in April 2020.
But in June 2020, the company announced that its service will be protected by high encryption standards in the coming weeks. But the protection is now being limited to only premium users as all the free accounts are still being exposed to prying eyes.
Note 1- Till February 2020, the Zoom app was only be used by 17,000 users. But as the COVID 19 Pandemic led to a lockdown throughout the world, most of the computing works became virtual; making the app usage zoom past 2.5 million downloads by the end of March 2020.
Note 2- In March 2020, the company faced a lawsuit from the US Federal court for leaking sensitive details of its users to technology companies like Facebook and Google.
