The video conferencing app Zoom has become very popular recently as more and more people are working from it home. But you should know that there is a problem with protecting your privacy.
Last night, Vice announced that Zoom's iOS app was sending data to Facebook – even if you don't have an account on the biggest social network.
Perhaps most shockingly, the company's privacy policy says nothing about this. Thus, the application does not mention anywhere that it sends your data to the social network.
Joseph Cox told its publication to Vice that every time you open the app, it sends your data to Facebook. The data includes: your device model, network provider, time zone, your city and your unique device ID. Needless to say, all of this data can be used by advertisers to serve you targeted ads.
Facebook's policy for using the Software Development Kit (or simply SDK) and pixel tracking is fairly straightforward: a website or application that uses it should explicitly state that your data is shared with third parties. In addition, it should have an option to exclude monitoring. The Zoom app says nothing about all of this.
Last week, the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for digital rights pointed out some of the risks to protect our privacy through the use of productof Zoom. The post said that your company's administrators can access several of your information during a meeting, including: device information, IP address, and functional system you are using. Additionally, the app has an attention tracking feature, which is disabled by default. This feature allows those who start a session to control whether the Zoom application window is enabled or not on desktop computers.
It may be very difficult to avoid Zoom right now, especially if your colleagues or clients use the service.
However, instead of using the app itself, you can join a meeting by opening a link in the program of your browser (on mobile or on desktop) and avoiding the app's intrusive functions.
A developer (Arkadiy Tetelman) also created a easy-to-use extension Chrome that can redirect you to the web version of the session.
