The CEO of Zoom, Eric S Yuan has addressed in his blogpost the complaint from all quarters that the app has a serious security issue. Yuan has directly acknowledged that the issue exists and has apologised to the users. He has also committed that the company will now work on fixing these issues. He has hinted that this will be done over the next 90 days.
Video conferencing app Zoom has been in the news recently for many reasons. The coronavirus pandemic has led to lockdown of entire cities and countries even and people have been working from home. Schools and other educational institutions have been trying to adopt and offer online tutorial methods. All these have meant a quantum leap for companies like Zoom. Zoom’s CEO puts this in perspective. According to him, as of December 2019 end, Zoom had a figure of daily meeting participants on its platform of around 10 million and now in March, 2020, this number has swelled to 200 million.
The CEO has said Zoom has offered to help 90,000 schools located in 20 different countries so that the process of education can carry on smoothly using the video conferencing facility offered on their platform.
The issue pointed out in Zoom was that it was sending personal data to Facebook irrespective of whether the user has a Facebook account or not.
Eric Yuan has gone on to list out the various steps the company intends to initiate, going forward, in order to provide a secure environment for the users of the app, whether they are free or paid users.
These include constituting a dedicated technical team to work on the safety and security issues and come up with fixes and involving third party experts and information security experts in the process of developing the app devoid of any vulnerabilities. Zoom will be transparent with the process and share as much information as possible for the benefit of the users of the app. They will enhance their existing bug bounty programme as well.
The CEO has also said he will hold a regular weekly webinar to share the progress made in making the Zoom app safe to use.