| Well, I put up a post titled "Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act": <https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2020/03/27/zoom/>.
It instantly hit #1 on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703000. The Harvard host is currently so hosed that I can't get inside the site.
One outcome: I got invited to talk with a law school class about it, which should be fun.
Anyway, there it is. More thoughts are welcome.
Doc On Mar 26, 2020, at 10:28 AM, JClark <
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> wrote:
To complicate things, second order confusion
prevails: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/26/sec-pauses-zoom-technologies-as-traders-confuse-it-with-zoom-video.html
On 3/26/20 6:29 AM, Adrian Gropper
wrote:
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I was unable to find the opt-out choice either. I tried.
I think this conversation should be moved to the public
Zoom account on Twitter.
- Adrian
Indeed, there is a lot
out there on the topic of Zoom and privacy: https://www.bing.com/search?q=zoom+privacy+risk.
Here are two of the better ones (one of which comes with a
large raft of trackers, as does nearly every news page):
Does Zoom sell Personal Data?
We do not allow marketing companies, advertisers, or
anyone else to access Personal Data in exchange for
payment. Except as described above, we do not allow any
third parties access to any Personal Data we collect in
the course of providing services to users. We do not
allow third parties to use any Personal Data obtained
from us for their own purposes, unless it is with your
consent (e.g. when you download an app from
the Marketplace). So in our humble opinion, we don’t
think most of our users would see us as selling their
information, as that practice is commonly understood.
That said, Zoom does use certain standard advertising
tools which require Personal Data (think, for example,
Google Ads and Google Analytics). We use these tools to
help us improve your advertising experience (such as
serving advertisements on our behalf across the
Internet, serving personalized ads on our website, and
providing analytics services). Sharing Personal Data
with the third-party provider while using these tools
may fall within the extremely broad definition of the
“sale” of Personal Data under certain state laws because
those companies might use Personal Data for their own
business purposes, as well as Zoom’s purposes. For
example, Google may use this data to improve its
advertising services for all companies who use their
services. (It is important to note advertising programs
have historically operated in this manner. It is only
with the recent developments in data privacy laws that
such activities fall within the definition of a “sale”).
If you opt out of “sale” of your info, your Personal
Data that may have been used for these activities will
no longer be shared with third parties.
Please: nobody uses Zoom to improve their
"advertising experience." Also "advertising programs
have historically operated in this manner" has only been
true for the last decade, during which ad blocking
became the biggest boycott in world history ( 2015) and
the GDPR (2018) and CCPA (2020) were made to stop it.
And where is the opt out choice in that last
sentence? I've never seen it.
I plan to pull this apart in a blog post later. (And
I welcome help with that.) Meanwhile, there are
alternatives. For example, FreeConferenceCall, which we
use for Customer Commons board calls. Here's its privacy
policy: https://www.freeconferencecall.com/privacy-policy.
Doc
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