What's Wrong with Zoom?

I’m sure you have heard about this thing called Zoom. Well if you haven’t it’s a video chatting platform being used to teach classes remotely and talk to friends and family.  I have personally used this platform to have family zoom meetings and catch up with friends during warranty quarantine. I came across this article the other day titled “The Lessons We are Learning from Zoom”. It was posted by the New York Times and explained what we have learned from Zoom. What caught my eye was this section of the article that said, “Use Zoom at Your Own Risk”. The article mentioned a lot about the privacy issues that the system has been trying to fix in the past couple weeks. Under this specific section it said use Zoom with caution. Apparently since Zoom didn’t create an app through Apple or Microsoft but instead just download it from their website they have access to more information on your laptop. The article mentioned it is safer to use the system on your mobile device rather then your laptop. It also mentioned to use alternatives to the cite like WebEx, which I currently use for my current classes. 

What the article talked about was kind of scary and made me think about the article I posted last week about privacy. It seems as if privacy is a big topic today and often talked about in the News. This article specifically talked about Zoom but there are so many other online platforms that have privacy issues. 

Another thing mentioned in the article was zoombombing. This is where other uninvited guests enter into a zoom meeting and disrupt it. My friend actually experienced this in one of her classes. The teacher was teaching, and some random kid entered into the zoom meeting and was saying a bunch of racial and mean remarks. She said no one really knew what to do. I guess this one of the big issues Zoom is trying to fix by adding passwords to enter a zoom meeting, but it seems as of zoom is only fixing the privacy issues that the users personally see like zoombombing but what about the privacy issues involving the stuff they are collecting through our computers? It is crazy how our private lives are no longer private as we move to more of virtual world. To read the full article click here