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Musing on COVID- 19
 
Zoom Users Grow 20x In 3 Months
April 05, 2020

Zoom's founder Eric Yuan said the company is pausing feature updates to work on supporting a "much broader set of users who are utilizing our product in a myriad of unexpected ways". This includes the updating of the company's privacy policy, releasing fixes for security flaws and the removal of Facebook integration in the iOS app that was collecting unnecessary information about users. There is also clarification around what is (and what isn't) end-to-end encrypted. Everyone seems to have had a number of Zoom calls this week, either for work, for catching up with friends, or because that's what your Pilates instructor is using to keep those weekly lessons going. Latest figures show that there are around 200m daily users of the app, up from 10m in December. The upshot of all this is that people are starting to look a little bit closer at the app and what it can do. Zoom isn't as secure as some would like, and while for those who are merely using it to chat with friends the risks are certainly not as high as say The UK Cabinet using it to discuss things.  The good news is that Zoom has acknowledged this and while that means new features are suspended for a while, calls should be safer in the long run.