The Zoom video conferencing application has become very popular lately, as more and more people work from home. But you should know that there is a problem with protecting your privacy.
Last night, Vice announced that Zoom's iOS app is sending data to Facebook - even if you do not have an account on the largest 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 Zoom products. The post states that your company administrators can access a lot of your information during a meeting, such as information about your device, IP address, and operating system. In addition, the application has an attention monitoring function, which is disabled by default. This feature allows those starting a session to check whether the Zoom application window is enabled or not on desktops.
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 your browser (mobile or desktop) and avoiding the intrusive features of the app.
A developer (Arkadiy Tetelman) also created a easy-to-use extension Chrome that can redirect you to the web version of the session.
