Is Zoom Really Safe?

  • AUTHOR: isbah
  • POSTED ON: March 31, 2020

Employees are enjoying work from home these days as they get up according to their own times and start working without observing any kind of corporate dress code. Furthermore, if you are staying at home you might think that there is no sword of surveillance hanging over your head right? Well, think again.


Source: Getty Images

The fact that you are in the comfort of your home does not mean that the employers are not keeping tabs on all your online movements, especially if you still have the company’s computers.

Companies usually ask employees to log into Zoom so that they can remain in touch with all the workers but there’s just one problem, the application is not as safe as they make it out to be.

Even if you have been using Zoom for a long time, you might not be aware of the feature “attendee attention tracking” which allows the host of the video conference to keep tabs on the computers of all the guests. Yes, your boss can see all your clicks on the system and evaluate your performance based on that.

Source: Mashable

“Hosts can see an indicator in the participant panel of a meeting or webinar if an attendee does not have Zoom Desktop Client or Mobile App in focus for more than 30 seconds,” explains the company. “‘In focus’ means the user has the Zoom meeting view open and active.”

So let’s say your boss is lecturing you about some boring statistics and you go to Youtube to browse through some cool dog videos. If your host has the attention tracking feature enabled, you can very well land in trouble because they’ll be able to see all your activities.

So, Mashable reached out to Zoom to ask if the guests would be notified of this feature but received no response from their team. So, make sure when you’re ignoring your boss you use your personal device to listen to music or watch cute pet videos.

 

Additionally, if you have paid subscription of the application, you can also record the meetings to the cloud. So your employer can look at all the activities that took place during the video call or better, pull out a written transcript to confront the employees later.

So, Zoom is not exactly the private application they claim themselves to be. In fact, it can store your private data and “sell” the information if required. Their privacy policies are quite confusing so make sure you read everything before tricking your boss.

Updated March 31, 2020
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