The Coronavirus has put much of the world under lockdown, but that hasn’t stopped the employed strata of society from conducting their duties. This allowed Zoom to gain mass popularity extremely quick, also exposing the privacy nightmare the app was. As the company moves towards damage control, one of the measures announced has been to implement the use of passwords for future Zoom calls.
Starting April 5, Zoom has implemented the password-system for calls made on its platform. This was done to prevent people from “video-bombing” Zoom calls, where an unwanted individual would enter the call and start playing loud music or put up obscene pictures etc. Zoom is preventing this by requiring users to enter a password to enter calls via Meeting ID. Additionally, Zoom will also make virtual waiting room on by default allowing the host to manually approve attendees.
Zoom communicated a number of changes to its users via email. The email reads “For meetings scheduled moving forward, the meeting password can be found in the invitation. For instant meetings, the password will be displayed in the Zoom client. The password can also be found in the meeting join URL.”
Zoom has been at the very centre of privacy-related concerns, with the number of lapses numbering into far too many. From vulnerabilities that allowed hackers to hijack webcams to leaking user email IDs. There were also recent reports of a large number of recordings of video conferences being available online. This falls in line with earlier reports that Zoom calls are not end-to-end encrypted. The domino that started this entire privacy nightmare was the initial report of Zoom sharing data with Facebook. Who would have thought that sharing data with Facebook would be the least of users’ concerns? Recently, Zoom CEO Eric S Yuan did mention that the company would halt development on new features, in light of fixing the current privacy concerns with the app. This is a good first step.