A lot of people have been using zoom recently mostly for doing meetings and school lectures remotely but there are some serious privacy concerns with this application.
Why zoom blew up more than all the other meeting applications?
One of the main reasons that why zoom blew up more than all the other meeting applications during this time of quarantine because that’s just how the shiny new thing they just want it and also because other people are using it as well.
Like most new software it’s got a lot of problems.
It’s actually had problems with the platform the first major problem was discovered in December of 2018 when zoom’s application had a vulnerability on all of the desktop application so that’s Mac OS Windows and Linux.
It would allow someone who isn’t even a meeting attendee to hijack the meeting and become the host of meeting.
When you’re a host of one of these meetings you have some privileges like you can remotely enable somebody’s microphone or webcam you can remotely send keystrokes to their computer and you can share their screen this effectively means that zoom was functioning as a remote access.
Then in July of the next year there was a vulnerability that allowed websites access to the webcam on Mac books because the Mac OS version of zoom installed a web server that would take requests that a standard browser wouldn’t also zoom didn’t give anybody real warning or notice to the users who installed it that a web server would even be running on their Mac I mean even if they did do you think most end users that are using zoom.
This web server would remain left behind even after zoom is uninstalled and the web server could just be used to reinstall zoom without any user intervention so zoom went from just being a remote access Trojan in 2018 to a persistent remote access Trojan in 2019 and then in 2020 it’s been revealed.
But basically zoom shares its data that it gathers from its users with several major companies like Google and it gives you no option to opt out of this data share they don’t even tell you that it’s going to be happening so things only get worse from here on the Mac OS version of zoom you don’t even have to click for zooms installation method to work.
Their enter end encryption though which straight up doesn’t work with any of their meetings or any of their communication at all because what zoom actually uses is an encryption more similar to transport layer security.
They basically encrypt the TCP and UDP connections with AES kind of like you would see in an HTTP communication when you go to a secure website but this is in no way end to end encryption as zoom still has access to all of the meetings all the audio all the pictures and text anything that you ever sent.
What is DNS?
conclusion
Their privacy policy where they shared and sold data about their users to customers without anybody being able to opt-out and not even telling you that they’re doing it and other lawsuits are in regards to some of the more severe security issues like the users being able to access each other’s emails contact info and links it linked in profiles without giving the user any heads-up that is happening without even giving them an option to consent to it.
That’s why the US government has banned the use of using zoom by government officials because of all these security flaws
