Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

> As quarantined millions gather virtually on conferencing platforms, the best of those, Zoom, is doing very well.

Why would Zoom care about their privacy issues if they're doing so well off? Seems like that's a good amount of positive reinforcement that their current approach is the right one to them. Maybe they'll lose a few thousand customers because of it, but given what I'm sure was a huge increase in the past few weeks, why would it be something they're concerned about?

Because it's the right thing to do.

Is Zoom the best though? Google Hangouts seems to be just as good.

I have a need for Zoom, virus or no, but the point of the article is why I don't give them money. Give them money, while the company is apparently still going to worry about milking advertising dollars out of me? That's just going to be a strong "no". As the final paragraph of TFA says, either charge more or give away less for free. But if you're selling me out to advertisers after I've given you money, then you're one of "those" companies that I avoid if at all possible. Because they're skeezy. You don't want to appear skeezy, do you, Zoom?

So for now Skype and MS Teams works fine, or at least fine enough that I don't bother with Zoom. Which brings me to a side question: what is the value proposition for Zoom? What does their product do so much better than the others that I'd put up with this shit? Why am I hearing the hell out of it lately? Outstanding PR department?

EDIT: thanks for your answers to “why use it, then?” Because “it just works” seems to be the summary, which hoo boy, one cannot say about a lot of the competition.

"the best of those, Zoom, is doing very well"

Is Zoom really the best? No other comparable platform out there?

Anyone know how difficult it would be to build something like it on top of aws or a similar cloud?

Right, but they are a US corporation in California. The "right thing to do" is pretty much at the end of their priorities list.

Because the EU is on lockdown, lots of EU citizens now using Zoom, and all of those users are potential liabilities due to GDPR issues.

Web RTC pretty much handles peer to peer video chat. I think you just need a server to organize the call’s, provide chat, and login from

I don't think geography really changes the incentives.

I am always very hesitant to say anything personal over any video chat medium unless I know it's end to end encrypted. I know that they're not actively watching my video meetings, but it's still causing a chilling effect in how I conduct myself with their service.

I use both at work, and Hangouts has less features and struggles more noticeably with bad connections. I consider Hangouts worse

For me, zoom consistently has far better A/V quality than hangouts.

So we have two anecdotes now I guess.

I’ve found Jitsi to be more than adequate with no need to download an app onto my computer. Just share the link with my friends!

To answer your last question - it works very well. I've used lots of virtual meeting software over the past 20 years, and zoom is by far the best.

I agree with your sentiment though - it makes me angry that they're selling my personal data. But sadly I don't think that any companies will voluntarily be non-skeezy...we really need laws and regulations in this space. I don't trust capitalism to take care of my privacy. If companies can get more money without breaking the law, they will absolutely do so.

I tried Google Hangouts on Firefox on Linux but couldn't get it to work at all. It just errored out before starting the call.

My take: Zoom is very approachable outside of enterprise. Skype (although historically has its roots with regular folks), is mostly used in a "Skype for Business" config. MS Teams is much the same way.

Good PR helps too, I suppose.

The unfortunate wisdom in business is "nobody cares about privacy or security," and in my experience it's true. Outside a small number of people nobody even asks these questions.

With our own product ZeroTier we get maybe 1-2 questions a year about privacy and so far only a few enterprise customers have even asked about the security of encryption and authentication. "It's encrypted" is good enough for 99.9% of the market. Encrypted with what? A cereal box cipher? Nobody cares.

What do people care about? In my experience its ease of use, ease of use, ease of use, ease of use, and ease of use, in no particular order. An app that's a privacy and security dumpster fire but is very easy to set up and use will win hands down over a better engineered one that requires even one or two more steps to set up.

I've been playing around with jitsi (https://jitsi.org/) and have been impressed. I may play around with deploying their server on aws this weekend (via this docker, most likely: https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet)

"Seems". Some people reported that Zoom handle gracefully more participants than Hangouts and performs better on a slow connection, see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15717701 and this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16155155

There are probably a couple of others you can find here and there.

Edit: Well, this thread also.

Skype for business has terrible UX. Traditional Skype works great for one-to-one, but can't handle a room full of people.

Everyone mentions Jitsi on HN but I'm guessing AV quality isn't as good as Zooms...

Try it at 12 people.

Try it when you want to control who is speaking and when.

Try it when you want to co-ordinate hundreds of participants and still want to track who has a question so you can hand the virtual mic / airtime to them.

Try it when you want breakout groups and to determine who is in which group, and after a set time for the groups to return to the main space.

What is good enough for 2 people facing each other, and appears to work perfectly well for a group of 5 or 6... doesn't quite scale to a company all-hands, or giving a lecture or seminar.

Tools fit a scale, and Zoom is excessive for the small and simple use-case but excels at the large and complex.

I don't know if it can. Its always bound by its government. By that measure I am really surprised people in large companies trust it. I really am surprised by its adoption.

broken link?

Ah yes, in my case it doesn't agree with firefox at all. I have chrome installed pretty much for hangouts only.

One major problem for Zoom is that it cannot merely focus on its core video conferencing competency while achieving the growth objectives of a publicly traded company. A high-quality video conferencing platform is hard to replicate until it isn't. The amount of talent and energy being spent right now on video conferencing, as a result of remote work, is going to amount to commoditization of high-quality video conferencing. Zoom has maybe another 12 months of juice left. As a result, it's advancing into new categories and will compete with customers very soon.

I'd be very cautious about sharing information with Zoom. You may be showing it where to fish.

We just used it at work with 500+ people. After all the various teleconferencing crap we paid $$$ for, we couldn't use them because they couldn't handle it. Zoom worked flawlessly.

It changes the culture. In my experience, Silicon Valley companies have more of a culture of growing at all costs. And they're either fanatical about privacy or they'll sell you out to the highest, middle, and lowest bidders all at once, then give it away free through an unpatched security hole too.

How does it fail to handle rooms of people? I ask because I’ve used consumer Skype to host a half dozen folks on two occasions in the past two weeks. Or is your definition of “room” larger than a mere six people?

Peer 2 peer doesn't scale for video conferencing with many users. Jitsi only does it for two participants. Everything larger has to go through the server.

I agree, but Zoom is a publicly traded company. Their incentives aren't necessarily aligned with the public good.

The question is "why should Zoom leadership care about the recent privacy concerns if the vast majority of their customers don't care?"

Their stock is up over 6% today while the market is down 4% (volatility caveats here obviously). So far the privacy concerns don't seem to be impacting the companies short or long term prospects, so I wouldn't expect the company to do the right thing.

Very very well. I haven't seen any issues with zoom and yet mine and everyone else's usage has gone up 10-100x. It's very user friendly and It Just Works.

Meanwhile, my company's VOIP acting funny. Conference calls not working. My wife was having issues with skype.

Yes, there are alternatives out there, but i'm yet to see one that is easy to use and reliable in the same way.

Does anyone know what could Facebook do with such video calling data?

PS- I hate misuse of my data as much as the next person.

Jitsi is nice for just video chat with a few participants (I use it where possible). Zoom is the more polished product, with more features and better scaling (Zoom calls with 90 attendees just work in my experience, I'd not trust Jitsi with that)

We often run rooms of 200+ people in our organization, which zoom handles without issue. Skype however does not, in our experience.

I can’t say what happened there (Hangouts works fine for me in Firefox), but Zoom won’t let you use Firefox at all if you want audio.

> What does their product do so much better than the others that I'd put up with this shit?

I'll share my perspective as an academic. Many of us have adopted Zoom, practically overnight, for our teaching, for one-on-one meetings with students, and even for conferences [1].

The answer is: It just works. It's easy. It does what we want it to, with a minimum of fuss.

As someone who now has a whole bunch of unanticipated shit to deal with, this is one less thing to worry about.

I definitely share your objection in principle. If this situation continues long into the future (a terrifying thought), then perhaps I'll revisit my choice of software. But in the short term, to be honest, I don't much care.

[1] https://www.daniellitt.com/agonize/

That, indeed, answers my last question, thank you. I suspected the answer might be along the lines of “it’s not a tech support shit show”, but my one opportunity to use it this week was cancelled. I’ll try again on Saturday for something someone else is hosting, and find out for myself.

My experience is diametrically opposite to that. All of our clients are large enterprises and the security and privacy features are very closely examined during procurement literally every time. We haven't had a single client conversation that is remotely like what you're describing.

Might be because our clients are banks but they really care about this stuff.

The UK cabinet has been meeting on Zoom during the crisis. It was in a media shot issued by 10 downing st yesterday.

I've used Skype (for business and normal Skype), FaceTime etc. The Zoom experience is just much better for larger groups (> 10).

I use Teams at work and would say it is comparable to Zoom in terms of AV quality (Microsoft owns both Skype and Teams portfolios, but Teams is built on a modern codebase that runs on different, markedly superior infra than Skype). Unfortunately Teams only works in the enterprise (O365), and it is still fairly new so it doesn't have a lot of the collab functionality like whiteboarding and breakout rooms that Zoom has.

Privacy issues aside, Zoom really is a better product. People are more forgiving of a product's peccadillos when it just works.

Yeah I hate ZOOM sooo much.

First there was the issue with them turning on the camera by default. At least you could turn that off. Then there was the spyware they installed on every Mac without even asking for consent. And now this...

Since the spyware thing I refuse to install their crap on my machine, but one of our suppliers still uses it and the web client is very choppy.. But they'll just have to put up with it. I'm never installing it again.

Not just Zoom, basically every company.

Really trying to figure out a response that isnt flip - but if you give up your principals when something is difficult, why have them at all?

Which is a long way of saying that Zoom is one the few companies that has been around long enough to deal with all the edge cases. Throw a few devs in a room for a bit and you'll get a perfectly usable video chat for 1-1 or a small group, but you won't get Zoom.

It works really well.

One that has been a total game changer for my company is when I'm hosting a conference call, I can simply "Invite by Phone" my participants. They get a phone call, are prompted to "Press 1 to enter the conference", and boom they're in. It's drastically reduced people fumbling around with phone numbers + participant codes, ending up in the wrong meeting, or getting stuck in some unnecessary software install loop. If someone is more than two minutes late, they're getting a phone call that brings them instantly into the meeting.

Also a really nice feature, again for phone conferences, is when people dial-in I see their phone number handle in the UI. But during the call as they introduce themselves or I look up their number, I can then rename their user to something recognizable. Now if I'm on a call with 5 people at another firm, I appear really impressive because I know who each person is by their name. When someone is speaking on the conference call, their icon lights up. If someone has a ton of background noise I can easily mute them.

Zoom Phone (addl paid feature) is awesome too. Virtual phone numbers, IVR, call routing, busy hours, I can instantly turn a 1:1 conversation into a zoom meeting that other people can join, etc. Zoom Phone works on my iphone like a regular dialer, and I can place/receive fully digital calls on it (pretty similar to how Google Voice works), so it doesn't matter if I have actual cell service.

I've never used Microsoft Teams, and does look really snazzy, but Zoom is an absolute joy to use compared to every single other conferencing software I have ever used. The video chat and screensharing is fast and responsive and just works exactly like you would expect it to.

Particularly when excellent privacy-respecting alternatives exist.

> but if you give up your principals when something is difficult, why have them at all?

Your answer sort of reads as if the choice of technology is the only friction people are currently dealing with. The situation isn't easy, even using some easy to use technology like zoom. Adding friction will only make things harder for people doing their best in already hard circumstances. It may well exceed their mental budget for friction.

I wish widely deployed privacy-respecting solutions were already deployed at scale, people trained in their use and a suitable curriculum available. But that's not where we are and putting more load on already well loaded people will not improve the situation.

? I'm literally on a zoom conference in firefox with audio right now.

I get that privacy is important but this company has become a household name over night. My mom literally just installed Zoom because her friends were talking about it (eyeroll). The company has obviously helped the global economy work remotely and keep productivity moving over the past few months. First, thank you to Zoom for making a great product and continue to work under ridiculous load. Secondly, I agree that privacy is an issue but can we tone it down a bit considering the global situation at stake.

What am I missing? I'm asking humbly. Because it seems like we are complaining about the food at a homeless shelter?

So, you think it'll turn into a generalized software consulting company??

Why doesn't it scale? Because for n participants, each would need n-1 connections?

I've tried it yesterday with some friends and in my opinion it's not ready for any serious use. The chat feature looks clunky and sometimes messages don't send on first try, especially the drawing board. Sometimes emojis you send in chat get plastered in the top right corner in about 10 times the size and stay there. I've also had the video feed and all controls disappear in the middle of a live session and the only fix was to close the app and sign-in via invite link. Still happy that something like this exists. Just needs a little bit of polish.

In the end, its cost vs benefit. Does the benefit overweight the cost ? For most people, including me the answer is Yes.

Yep. It just works. First time use is nearly instant.

WebEx always took a while to on-board.

So some company I don't like will advertise at me. I don't like it, but I don't care that much.

I am prioritizing. During the present COVID-19 situation, my top two priorities are (1) maintain my health, including my mental health, and refrain from posing a health hazard to others, and (2) maintain my relationships with my students, colleagues, and collaborators.

As I see it, if I give some skeezy private company some personal information by accident, then I am making a personal sacrifice, and not all that big of one. I'm trying to worry about my duties to others first.

P2P video for large groups is dead over the public internet because you don't get the network's help in doing 1-many delivery.

> It works really well.

Does it?

Asking because I just left a zoom meeting with horrible sound quality and extremely bad video quality. Why would anyone prefer that to Teams is beyond me.

Edit: interesting this is _heavily_ downvoted. Can't a person have a bad experience and tell HN about it?

Zoom Phone has been a game changer.

1 of the 2 big cell phone networks we have: Rogers, is regularly failing to connect calls during peak hours for the past week. Being able to do digital calls has changed a lot, and probably took a load off their network.

(I say 2 big networks because Bell and Telus share tower infrastructure, Dunno where it separates out again, possibly just billing.)

I would cheerfully listen to recommendations.

And I should add that I'm trying out MS Teams as an alternative. After six days, and multiple e-mails back and forth with our IT department, I think I've almost got it set up properly.

Zoom tells me I have no audio devices and need to reboot every time I launch it. I ignore the message and it magically works fine. Great piece of software /s

I think you hearing a lot about it because (a) everyone is quarantined and wanting to use the tools they use at work to help setup book club meetings, table-top RPG sessions (did this last night and it actually worked great), etc. (b) it's perhaps easier to use than some others, (c) there's likely a huge PR push right now, and (d) I believe its pricing is better for non-enterprise use than others.

My company's virtual meeting solutions are a mess; it's the one really messy area in our tooling. For the longest time we had GoTo, but then the dev team specifically also had hipchat for Slack-like interactions. Then hipchat went away, and for some reason the org took that as a cue to do an org-wide rollout of MS Teams, with no approval for us to use Slack. Somewhere along the way certain people somehow acquired Zoom licenses and started using those. Then just about two weeks ago the whole org was told to switch to Zoom, but now not enough people have licenses and all the old GoTo licenses are kaput.

Anyways, the reason I have heard various people from the business side give for why they like Zoom is "GoTo was too hard to use." I don't really see that, and I also wonder if there's some sort of 'FOMO' going on. A couple big vendors we interact with use Zoom, Zoom is big in the news currently -- "everybody uses Zoom!" I do also think it's maybe a bit cheaper at enterprise scale.

I don't mind Zoom from a UX/call quality perspective. I think Alt-A to unmute is super unintuitive but that's a very minor quibble, and for all I know shortcuts are customizable. I am, however, very discouraged by Zoom's privacy story as we're discussing here.

---

As my own side note, I am generally on board with almost everything MS has been doing lately -- we're mostly a MS shop as they help us with pricing, given we're a nonprofit, while AWS told us 'no chance' -- but Teams has to be the single buggiest MS product I've ever used. Just now, over the past month or so, I've noticed it very slowly improving. But for the first year of our usage, we experienced constant issues. Dropped calls, silent crashes, daily sync failures. My favorite one was, every time I would shut down Teams, it would relaunch itself a few seconds later with a message saying "sorry, Teams has crashed, we're recovering." Apparently every time the program received a shutdown msg it just assumed "oops, another crash."

Did you know they also make a public address book in your entire organization of people on zoom? You can't easily opt out of this. I'm currently contracted at a govt organization which other than mundane conference calls you have to reserve a spot for by email (which nobody does because it's not 1998) doesn't have any remote video/audio infrastructure so basically each team is doing their own thing. Some use zoom, others discord and so forth. A lot of teams started to use zoom and they sign up with their @xyz.gov e-mail. Literally everyone is then public to everyone on @xyz.gov and whether they're currently in a call.

Everyone is still on the free plan and reconnecting after 40 minutes (it's basically standard procedure when the 10 minute countdown starts to rejoin). I bet it won't take long before zoom sales get in touch and you think the person going to approve the tailor-made $$$ contract cares about privacy? Or the 700 people already using it except for a small minority who don't have any influence in this kind of decision making?

Is Zoom-dissing just in fashion these days? In the last few days I've seen these on HN:

- Having the Facebook SDK installed in their iOS app, which sends user data to Facebook even if the user has no Facebook account

- Having a setting, that's off by default, that lets other callers see whether you have the Zoom app in focus

- Having a general "accessibility over security" engineering attitude, which led them to eg shipping their desktop apps with a builtin HTTP server (and with it a much bigger security surface area), just to skip one extra step in the join-meeting-via-a-zoom-link-flow. They removed it after a backlash, but the engineering attitude probably didn't change.

Now, I agree that all of these are bad. It's OK for outrage to happen over these things, every single one of them are shit and major companies like Zoom need to get their act together.

But I also think that many apps out there do stuff like this. The majority of popular apps, I'd wager. Why is Zoom being singled out? First Vice, now a Harvard blog, a bunch of unsubstantiated tweet storms.. Is it just, en vogue to diss Zoom somehow?

1. Paid service 2. Privacy is important.

I have about a year of near daily anecdotal evidence to the contrary. So, in my experience, yes it works extremely well. I'm not saying it's better than Teams at all, I've never used that, and it looks pretty awesome from their marketing page. Microsoft has really stepped up their software quality game recently.

I can say Zoom is way the hell better than: Slack/Screenhero, TeamViewer, join.me, GoToMeeting, WebEx, Skype, Google Hangouts, BlueJeans, ugh the list goes on over the past years.

UK cabinet is about to find out what "zoom bombing" means the hard way...

> I agree that privacy is an issue but can we tone it down a bit considering the global situation at stake.

It seems to me that this is the best possible time to make some noise about Zoom's privacy problems. What better time for that could there be than during a period of mass adoption? What better opportunity to shame a company into compliance than during a global pandemic when the responsibilities of companies to the community is being emphasized?

You might have a point if castigating Zoom for spying on users somehow facilitated the spread of corona, but it doesn't.

> So some company I don't like will advertise at me. I don't like it, but I don't care that much.

You're normalizing it and making your students use it though, so it's really not "it affects me, but I don't care enough", it affects others as well. And let's not kid ourselves: once it's established, nobody will switch to something else, because they'd have to explain and guide everyone they want to talk to to install another app etc.

I appreciate listing the areas in which Zoom beats competitors. It helps people understand where work should be done on alternatives.

My company has been remote-only for about 1.5 weeks now and we have 4 different conferencing systems that people are using. It's interesting that everyone has their preferences, but for small meetings nobody is using Zoom as far as I've seen.

OTOH if you’re making money from your product why trash it yourselves

Zoom is the first video conferencing platform that I've used, that works reliably. They are gonna come out of this mess smelling like roses, no matter what carbuncles are exposed.

I've been doing videoconferencing for over 30 years (Yes, they had it back then -we used PictureTel systems, over ISDN).

I regularly participate in Zoom meetings with 20 or more attendees. I know of ones that have over 400.

An amazing thing to me, is that technophobes can pick up on it very easily. Very little of that pre-meeting "Mute your mike!", "Can you hear me?", "Whose dog is that?", tons of texts, asking for help, etc, stuff.

Skype is very bad for more than a small handful of attendees.

WebEx and GoToMeeting are OK, I guess, and I've heard good things about BlueJeans.

But Zoom is what I use, and Zoom is very popular with people that suddenly need to gather, and can't do so, physically.

I used to work in videoconferencing, and Zoom seemingly came out of nowhere and everybody loved it, because people overwhelmingly said it really is the best.

In terms of actual reliable video/audio experience. When evaluating platforms, other videoconferencing solutions simply suffered quality issues more -- taking longer to start, glitches, latency, pausing, echo, and so on.

Also, the hard part isn't building 1-1 video chat. It's having it work with 20 or 200 separate participants.

I have no idea why they're better except that building reliable audio-video at scale turns out to be a really hard problem, and they seemed to focus their engineering on that specifically.

Kind of like file sync was really unreliable until Dropbox decided to focus on building a sync tool that actually "just worked". Same philosophy. Zoom is the Dropbox of videoconferencing.

A while ago I remembered reading that a typical video conferencing/streaming setup on AWS has astronomical costs. I don't remember exactly which AWS services were used in the estimate but it seemed very prohibitive for startups.

...huh. When I was trying it yesterday, it told me I couldn't use my computer's microphone "in this browser" and would have to either download the app or join by phone. It did let me use my webcam though, which seemed a bit bizarre.

> Try it when you want breakout groups and to determine who is in which group, and after a set time for the groups to return to the main space.

> or giving a ... seminar.

Zoom is good for large, hugely interactive, video conferencing and meeting.

I am unaffiliated, just a user who has used most of what is out there.

Tried it literally 2 hours ago. Didn't work, had to switch to chrome.

(Windows 10, if it matters. IIRC I had the same experience on linux)

Use case: Mediation

Zoom is the only easy to use videoconferencing tool I have found that can do breakout rooms. Mediation is, by law, a confidential process.

From the ConsumerReports article: "Videos aren't off-limits, according to the document, and neither are transcripts that can be generated automatically, the documents you share on your screen, or the names of everyone on a call."

In recommending that my clients use Zoom, am I violating my ethical and legal requirements? Is Zoom breaking the law?

> Why is Zoom being singled out?

There is no conspiracy here, calm down. Zoom is popular, therefore people talk about it.

Likewise you are affecting others too by telling people to install other app. Lets not kid ourselves not everyone value privacy the same.

If you are going to require students/employees to use a tool like Zoom (and choosing it for lectures is definitely making it a requirement) then you are obligated to, at the very least, seek informed consent from students/staff as to what privacy they are giving up. And if someone doesn't consent (voluntarily), you have to seek alternatives and mitigations.

If you're a Comp Sci or Engineering prof you really have an obligation to try harder. You have the capability to explain mitigation techniques (virtual machines, sandboxing, using temporary email addresses, VPNs).

Longer term I think we will see a host of Zoom competitors, because really there is nothing special in the client. Hangouts in particular could easily eclipse it with some work.

Also, I think the grid of faces approach is just awful. Many people have been working on VR meeting systems which have significant advantages for multiperson communication (i.e. discussion vs broadcast). Lecture/theatre VTC (which provides an aggregated feedback signal to the presenter) is completely unmet by Zoom. So once we're past the hump the field will broaden, and at that point the privacy requirements have to be enforced rigourously.

I also find their UI to be frustrating, especially the chat part of it. I have yet to find a way to make the chat more dense, every message seems to have an excess of white space. Also, at least with the company that I use it with, there's no obvious way to search message history.

Completely agree with this, banks care. They don't always care in the best of ways, usually it's just about ticking a box in a spreadsheet, but at least they ask.

Of all things, lack of trust and transparency from a video platform is pretty scary. Hard to justify using Zoom any longer. Lifesize is a good alternative that a lot of people don't know about (I have no stake in them, but have used it before).

Nothing works good enough to be worth forfeiture of our self respect

But are you excluding people for whom the cost vs benefit is the other way? If you're in a position of authority it is up to you to minimise the violation.

The reason Zoom is doing so well is part of its vulnerability. There is very little vendor lock-in with virtual conferencing platforms. If something new/better comes out next month, there isn't much a company will give up by switching vendors. There is little to no infrastructure to setup/maintain. This is the same reason Slack's popularity has skyrocketed. Because of the lack of history and transient nature of the content shared in them, these areas are quick to gain popularity, but also quick to be replaced when a better product emerges.

Each client has to send n-1 streams and domestic connections usually have quite weak uplink.

Have you taken a look at [0]WhereBy? It's been recommended as a great alternative to Zoom.

[0]https://whereby.com/

No, it really doesn't, which is why I prefaced it with talking about being flip.

It asks the question "What is the point of a principle?"

I dont think calling privacy a principle is true if you are willing to give it up for something that "just works" - I believe covid is likely one of the biggest problems in the modern age, but during times of hardship we need to cling ever harder to our principles, or consider that maybe it isn't nearly as important to us as we thought.

But your flawless experience does not help me.

I had a horrible meeting today (not the first time, but today was particularly bad).

In fact, I recorded part of it with my phone and tomorrow I Will have a chat with our IT people to ask people to avoid using zoom.

No. I think it will be a services provider operating within a "remote economy".

I believe Zoom Phone is a whitelabel of RingCentral

And that's why my question was calling privacy a principle, it seems like its not. You don't give up your principles because the cost outweighs the benefit - that's literally what principles are about, you do them when they are hard.

Having used zoom, teams, skype for business, webex, and many others ... zoom is the only one of these which just works. I'm on the con calls typically 5+ hours a day. Yes, it is soul crushing.

Teams sorta works, though it often messes up with devices. Headsets and speakers (I've got a Jabra speak 710). Often times it handles contention badly.

Skype ... yeah. The less said the better.

Webex. Must be marketing for Zoom and others, given how unreservedly horrible the UX is.

I've also used uberconference some years ago. Almost as good as zoom.

I am looking at containerized ways to run zoom to restrict its access to my system, but it is the best IMO, by far.

[edit] I should note that I've also used Viber a bit. Less now though. Mostly for calling home from overseas. Not great for conferencing though.

Compared to the other ten or twenty videoconferencing solutions, it's the only one that has worked reliably and without accessibility issues for technical and non-technical people in my life. The automatic video and audio processing features make it so that a day-one user has as good an experience as a year-two user, and I haven't had to answer any technical support questions about it to my family.

FaceTime is the only serious competitor I can think of that's able to deliver as quality of a call experience in a 1:1 setting with non-technical participants, but it's inaccessible on Windows/Android for starters, and lacks the presentation chops to be used in a business setting.

I’m interested to hear the type of institution and age range of students with whom you are having 1 to 1 video calls. I’m a teacher in an 11-18 secondary school in the U.K., and we have been instructed to avoid 1 to 1s with students as a safeguarding risk.

I’m not casting any aspersions here, I’m only interested in comparing notes with a fellow teacher.

Not much different to Microsoft. Buy Windows, still get tracking and ads. I use it because it’s convenient.

Hard to justify moving from zoom to ms teams when Microsoft have shown they don’t care about privacy either.

> With our own product ZeroTier we get maybe 1-2 questions a year about privacy and so far only a few enterprise customers have even asked about the security of encryption and authentication.

Why would people ask you that? You already put the answers in the public documentation.

> No, it really doesn't, which is why I prefaced it with talking about being flip.

Preface or not, it still reads like that. You're extolling one principle. I entirely agree that privacy is important but should be upheld. But there are other conflicting principles at work here - the list here is in no way complete.

    * The right to privacy.
    * The right of pupils to receive an education
    * The right of teachers to limit the amount of work and energy they need to put into their work.
    * The right of teachers and pupils (and the general public) to stay at home and evade infection.

So glorifying one principle at the expense of others is at best problematic. What's the point of upholding one principle and ignore that at the moment, it conflicts with others?

And that's why your absolutism on one principle to me still reads flip - or at least ill considered - even if you preface it with "I don't want to be flip."

(U.S. here and didn't recognize the term, link for others' convenience)

Safeguarding is a term used in the United Kingdom and Ireland to denote measures to protect the health, well-being and human rights of individuals, which allow people — especially children, young people and vulnerable adults — to live free from abuse, harm and neglect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguarding

If your principles are in conflict, I suggest recognizing that not all of them are actually principles, which is what I poorly communicated.

Probably, graduation and post-grad students.

In undergrad 1 to 1 also happens, but they are less frequent.

You have hold a principle because the benefit is greater than the cost, otherwise whats good is a principle ?

Or maybe people has different principle.

Ok, but then you cannot have any principles, because even the principles laid out in the declaration of human rights are in conflict to each other.

So many replies here have identified the value of Zoom: it is easy to use and has reasonably good quality. So the questions I have: can we add to this? Are there ways to use Zoom more privately?

Personally I haven't seen many people offer up alternatives that are clear winners. They all have tradeoffs. Since there's tradeoffs I have a hard time moving people to some other direction. If I could says, "Oh Zoom is nice, but Schmooz is the best!" I know people who'd make the move. Even if it's paid.

> This is the same reason Slack's popularity has skyrocketed. Because of the lack of history <snip>

Slack's business model [1] is storing all history and charging for access for it. Nothing transient about that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#Business_mode...

You are right that many pieces of software infringe on privacy. However, Zoom only recently has become one of the most widespread of these and because of that has only recently begun to affect a significant portion of the population, hence why it is newsworthy.

I think this also has to do with the fact that Zoom is being used for work and school and therefore people have less choice over their use of it. It's not a social network that many people have chosen to start using, it's a piece of software that millions of students and other people are being required to use without consideration of privacy.

It goes both way, if you force privacy, you too are excluding people for whom the cost vs benefit is the other way

Their About Us page makes no mention whatsoever of technology. There is no CTO, no VP Engineering, etc. Quite odd. If they were relabeling something else, that could explain it.

Yeah it's high bandwidth out (egress costs) and video processing is expensive, whether CPU (more cores * more time) or GPU (expensive instances). You basically have to process every input camera stream in real time to generate miniatures and do change detection (although at a lower frame rate, which you can signal to the client, so rate/resolution scaling is done client-side). VAD (voice activity detection) is client side, one mixer per output stream on the server -- not too bad. Video decode, mixing and H.265 encoding is expensive, but saves on transmission bandwidth.

Then consider that contention is terrible for real time and you would want dedicated instances.

I don't know the zoom architecture, but I doubt they could scale so fast without lots of cloud. I think they have an enormous bill, which they are using capital to pay for because they are becoming a household name.

> Can't a person have a bad experience and tell HN about it?

Not necessarily, no. It's downvoted because it's one low-evidence anecdote amidst comments from people who've been using it daily (two years, here). That doesn't mean it didn't happen, but without supporting evidence it's difficult to find relevance in a single poor call.

Some basic evidentiary questions for you to consider, that would help distinguish between "someone's Internet was broken" (more likely) and "Zoom is defective" (less likely), for example:

1) Was only one participant experiencing issues, or were all participants blurry? Did Zoom warn you that of connection instability? Did Zoom show yellow or red connection status bars for the affected participant(s)?

2) Does your (or their) Internet connection show instability such as high latency (Bufferbloat) when performing a speed test capable of measuring and reporting latency-under-load fluctuations? https://dslreports.com/speedtest

3) Did the sound quality issue involving one or more participants who were not using in-ear or over-ear headphones?

4) Was the sound quality issue reproducible in a followup call for testing? Was it reproducible using "call in by phone" audio rather than "internet" audio for testing?

EDIT:

5) If you stop sharing your video, does the problem improve? If you activate screen sharing, does the problem worsen?

Zoom works in China, ergo it is being recorded and analyzed. Automatic voice transcription is a thing.

The first is a fair criticism, point taken.

Your second point I disagree with; I think if people raise objections, encourage people to switch, and volunteer to shepherd others through the technical details -- then people will be agreeable, and we'll see a shift which will gradually become pervasive.

Such as?

> Anyone know how difficult it would be to build something like it

Companies have been trying to build the perfect video chat system for about 30 years. Companies with tens of billions of dollars in cash and more in stock. Almost all of them suck in various ways.

You can stream one audio+video to one person, and you can stream it to multiple people. But then do multiple duplex audio+video streams to multiple people, on multiple platforms, with low CPU, memory, and bandwidth requirements, with user controls, recording, chat, screen sharing, drawing, and 50 other features. Get 49 of them right, and the 50th feature will suck, and your users will hate it and be ready to move to a different product. I think it's one of the most complex user applications that exists.

Honestly UberConference works way better...

Try it at 600 people, with at least 50 unmuted. (Not a made up example. Zoom worked, last week, for us.)

"I Will have a chat with our IT people to ask people to avoid using zoom." Foolish. What works better combining VTC and easy join phone calls? Surely not Teams. Was on a 400+ person Zoom call that went great. Problem is likely in your network.

Is it common to want to keep all that history? My understanding was it's best practice to delete chats after a certain period to limit the surface area of any potential legal discovery.

The consequences of privacy loss can be severe, up to and including violent death (partner violence, anti-LGBTI attacks, religious persecution). A person with a moral (and likely legal) obligation to protect individual privacy cannot lightly discard someone's fundamental rights to favour the marginal benefit of others.

We haven't seen a Zoom log found in an open S3 bucket yet, or a leak via fb, but experience says that it is only a matter of time.

So if you're going to mandate Zoom, own the risk. Mitigation is possible: provide recorded streams for secured download (if safe/ethical/notified to record other participants!); provide a work laptop with a non-identifying config instead of a BYOD; many other options.

You are correct that there is history, but my point is that I don't believe the existence of long lived chat history (storing all messages longer than 3-6 months) will be a blocker for a company to switch to a better chat platform. Chat should not be looked at as a durable store of critical, long term information. Slack is trying to create a vendor lock-in that doesn't exist.

By that argument, does anyone have any software principals? I mean, if someon told me "use software product X, or I will horribly kill you and everyone you love", I'm going to use the software.

Why are you assuming that the Zoom software was the culprit? Perhaps you had an unstable connection with high jitter?

Download the client.

Be aware that allowing everybody to continue following their preferences will result in the same proliferation that you see with text editors, email clients, and programming languages. Based on having only 4 different systems, I might predict that your company size is ~100-200 people (though that's a napkin estimate based on a single integer). There are at least 10 systems available, and certainly many more that are only accessible to technical people.

How hard can it possibly be to replicate? Zoom walked into a market packed with established players and now they own the whole thing. That suggests the barriers to entry aren't so great.

Another pretty great thing with Zoom is that it'll keep a call up even if, say, your home internet drops out and you switch to tethering on your phone. It sounds rare, but with Australian internet or dodgy campus wifi, this is a really useful feature.

Not to present any kind of “whatabouts” or whatever, just speaking truth to power:

You’d be shocked (maybe) how much White-labeling and reselling there is in the communications/“unified” communications and presence space.

Especially now in the age of programmable voice.

Yes we transitioned from Webex + Lync + Skype + Cisco phones to just Zoom and it is amazing (aside from privacy breaches of course). Conferencing is a pain and Zoom solves a lot of existing issue in that area so companies recognize this, especially when people in change also use conference software :) .

Having used a few of these lately, it seems to have the best quality of call.

Skype is terrible some days. Google hangouts is OK. Cisco Webx is dead in the water every time I have tried to use it.

Maybe I just haven't used Zoom enough as the other two do have good days and bad days.

There's a missing entry here which most teachers recognize as essential, and many privacy advocates would reject as unacceptable:

* The right of teachers to monitor their students activities during class.

(Also: Your list is unreadable due to the use of code no-wrap formatting. Please don't use code indents for blockquoted normal text.)

Clearly they don’t “need” to do a thing. They were already gaining a ton of market share before COVID19, and this has only cemented their position.

The people who are concerned about privacy aren’t really the ones writing them big checks anyway.

Surely, though, there is a way for zoom to do both at the same time. That you and one of your sibling posts gives them some benefit of the doubt (or at least the appearance of it) is... sad.

No.

But if you downvote anything that is not compatible with your own experience, where does that leave us?

To answer your other questions: this was not the first time and there are others here expressing similar issues. Teams works reasonably well from same computer & network.

If your concern is privacy, why are you using Skype and MS Teams?

If you don't want a third party getting your contact information, then use a private solution that's actually private. Jitsi and Matrix are open source solutions that both support video conferencing.

The first line of their profile says:

> Mathematics (assistant) professor at the University of South Carolina.

Because other teleconferencing software worked just fine under the same condition.

I just realized this yesterday when Zooming with someone in China w/o a VPN.

out of curiosity, why not Teams?

If you’d included that second paragraph in your anecdote, I personally wouldn’t have downvoted it.

Ah, but Slack doesn't delete the history either unless you pay them: https://slack.com/help/articles/203457187-Customize-message-...

On the free tier it's still there, on their servers.

For a lot of industries, deleting internal communication is illegal. For any publicly traded company in the US, all internal communication needs to be archived for five years.

Well I think this a standard feature of conference call software, you can quit and re-join at any time.

It's a necessary evil for many of us students. Institutions just aren't willing to deal with compatibility/pricing issues with such short notice. Zoom found its niche as a bootstrap crisis averter, I guess

Teams is way better than Skype, provided everyone is on a computer.

The few customers we've had that ask are large, so yes. I am speaking of the majority of individuals and small businesses.

>The consequences of privacy loss can be severe, up to and including violent death (partner violence, anti-LGBTI attacks, religious persecution)

If you are going that way then likewise, there is always someone somewhere could die because the software doesn't work because they prioritize privacy.

Beside, The reason we have growing acceptance for the LGBT is because of the openness and transparency. That won't happen if we have perfect privacy.

Yes is true that leak is only matter of time, so its even more infeasible to maintain privacy. The solution should be to assume information is public as much as we can and fix the issue that arise from that.

Where is the Zoom CEO in this thread?

Zoom have had several controversies with its privacy now and still going strong . Great staying power like Facebook.

The product must be really good. I have never used them more than in couple occasions and found it like any other web conferencing tool in my opinion.

>One that has been a total game changer for my company is when I'm hosting a conference call, I can simply "Invite by Phone" my participants. They get a phone call, are prompted to "Press 1 to enter the conference", and boom they're in. It's drastically reduced people fumbling around with phone numbers + participant codes, ending up in the wrong meeting, or getting stuck in some unnecessary software install loop. If someone is more than two minutes late, they're getting a phone call that brings them instantly into the meeting.

Why on earth are people needing to make POTS phone calls to join a meeting? Not only is the audio of vastly inferior quality, the information isn't being kept secure AND they can't see anything being presented.

Instead, why not shoot them a link so they can just click it and be in the meeting? That's how it SHOULD work, but that's not how it DOES work with Zoom (unless you engage in tomfoolery to make like you're trying but failing to install the software, and only then do you get a link to join via browser — but then then you get a deliberately-crippled experience because fuck you).

Yeah that's an issue with many 'modern' apps. MS Teams does the same :( I really preferred slack but now that MS throws Teams in for free we have to cope with that.

No, you've missed the point - you don't quit and rejoin, it just freaking stays up. It's really remarkable - I can switch networks and VPNs on my macbook any time during a screensharing session and get nothing more than a slight delay for a second on video, and zero perceptible drop on audio.

I have the feeling that outside of the HN community and other tech communities, most people just don't care about this, which is sad.

If anybody else is wondering about alternatives, DHH sourced some ethical options in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1243248363979419649?s=21

Of those, I tried whereby.com yesterday and was blown away. It just works with zero downloads in any browser, including mobile, and is very high quality. From my brief usage, I highly recommend it for small teams.

> Your second point I disagree with; I think if people raise objections, encourage people to switch, and volunteer to shepherd others through the technical details -- then people will be agreeable, and we'll see a shift which will gradually become pervasive.

This doesn't square with any experience I've ever had trying to get $alternative_technology adopted because of $principle in favor of $default_thing, and from what I've gleaned talking to others, and reading the experiences of others online, the problem isn't me.

Maybe post Cambridge Analytica the world has changed -- I at least don't get looked at like I have three heads when I tell people I'm not on Facebook anymore -- but if folks are still responding to complaints about privacy issues like this with what amounts to "meh, don't have the energy" then I'm skeptical. If zoom becomes "the standard," I don't think the inertia will be much easier to overcome.

The paid version has a feature where the organization admins can listen and watch in conversations without anybody noticing or giving consent. I am quite sure that doing so would be illegal where I live (Germany).

For one, Teams doesn't include dial-in/dial-out, that's another $1.50 per month per line (still cheaper than Zoom if you have Office 365 already).

But another, more important one is: the last time we tried using Teams/S4B meetings, if you are contacting a client where they are in a different Office 365 tenant, and the security settings are turned up on their tenant to not allow logging in as a "guest" to other tenants, they can't join your meeting. (or at least, not without launching an incognito window and reopening the meeting link) Azure AD tries to login as their user account, fails because they aren't allowed, and leaves them on an error message screen without any way for the meeting host to troubleshoot. Zoom, since it's out of band of anything that IT usually touches (unless you turn on the "only allow people in my organization to join this meeting" function), won't have this issue since the outsider will automatically be offered the choice of logging into a Zoom account or just giving a name for this conversation (as far as I've seen).

It's one of those scenarios where Microsoft being so entrenched in the environment actually lessens productivity. You can argue that people shouldn't be blocked from joining outside meetings, or that shadow IT is evil and should never be encouraged, but when security steps in the way of productivity, shadow IT usually naturally results, as so many SaaS vendors (Zoom, Basecamp, Dropbox) rely upon. Zoom acts like malware (to a degree) by installing to user-only directories and working around corporate security to make it easier for the end user to use the product. At a big company, approval for a video conferencing system could take months of PoCs, vendor meetings, implementation, and so on. But if you can just say "Join my Zoom meeting! It takes a minute! It integrates with Outlook so we don't have to even go to another website! And it's cheap!", then all of the corporate BS is cut through, and by time IT finds out, half the company is using it and they'll start paying for it so the enterprise stuff works (i.e. SSO).

(Basecamp is another good example of this. It gets tons of adoption by running in a browser window and only costing $99 per month for unlimited users, so it fits on a manager's expense account and user onboarding is super simple from there. and it's really easy to use.)

> Give them money, while the company is apparently still going to worry about milking advertising dollars out of me?

Does Zoom have ads? I haven't seen any. I believe all of the ad tracking is for the reverse: Zoom wants to see if their own advertising is effective. For example, if they buy an ad on Facebook that you saw and then you install the app, they can attribute the install to that ad and measure ROI.

is GDPR still in effect in UK?

"Zoom is the Dropbox of videoconferencing" weird I had the exact same thought yesterday and it even translates to everyone thinking they can build it themselves with gluing tools x,y,z together!

Possibly, though my personal experience is that people differ mostly on their understanding of privacy issues, not their valuation of privacy. Somebody that doesn't fully understand how much you can tell about someone just by looking at their call meta data isn't concerned about meta data. I've found most alter their stance when they get a better understanding of the issue.

Truth is, it has the best video quality I've seen out of any of the video conferencing tools out there by a mile. Only Facetime comes close and it's limited to apple hardware and has more limited screen collaboration tools.

As a result, they're going to have staying power.

I'm not sure about remarkable, it's a quality of implementation issue. Around the turn of the century I worked on an EU project where we did this for voice calls with IPv6.

In the present era QUIC can support doing this, although whether that'll be something every popular implementation actually does remains to be seen, but again a high quality implementation will be able to just rebind - "Hi, this is still me, I just have a different network address now" and carry on seamlessly.

What are some end-to-end encrypted video chat apps? I know Signal offers it but only has one on one calls.

The case of #poorjennifer calls for major concerns. Every woman should feel safe using Zoom for work, never worry about privacy violation, such as manager videotaping her without her consent, then saving recordings in zoom cloud without her knowledge. Zoom videotaping goes against Privacy Law in California. Consent is diligently required.

What could possibly happen in an educational setting that is so sensitive that it needs a CIA-level approach to safeguarding privacy?

The consequence of getting on a school bus can be life or death. The consequence of eating a peanut butter sandwich can be life or death.

If you’re a medical professional or psychiatrist, maybe you shouldn’t use zoom due it’s privacy record. But if you’re teaching a lecture on linked lists to your class of 30 kids, death via persecution should probably be very low on your considerations when choosing video conference tech.

Title is sort of incorrect: "Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act" should be "Zoom needs not to do stupid shit"...

I'm a fan of the product but this is ridiculous behavior (great Linux support). I have a hard time imagining the product meeting in which "Yes. That's a good idea. Let's do it." was said. I get that FB is big, that Zoom wants the credibility, etc but that's a sign that management is not thinking clearly about their product and should be a red flag to any investor (among the many green flags from current demand)...

That's creeeeeeepy.

I'd love for it to be so, but social inertia is a big factor. It's easiest to just use what everybody else is using, you won't have complications and, very important, you won't stick out.

It can change rapidly in small communities, e.g. you getting everyone in your department together, deciding on $goodAlternative and using that whenever possible (in addition to Zoom, because you'll still have to communicate with the outside world). But at large?

> Zoom has an extremely valuable service, which it performs very well—better than anybody else, apparently.

Objection - best advertised (or should I say "best" advertised) doesn't equal best. I'd be truly surprised if somebody actually presented convincing arguments that Zoom service is better than anybody else.

I've been using Firefox on Fedora for both Zoom and Hangouts for at least two years. No problems.

Slack, on the other hand, can go to hell.

They can track that from the clickthroughs. The adtech economy is far richer that just showing ads and tracking ads -- the suggestion is that they're feeding data from your use of Zoom to enrich your advertising id(s) to help others provide you the most relevant possible advertising experience / track the living daylights out of you.

Delete according to world-view.

harvard needs to pay their food service workers

Does any one have any knowledge at how Zoom is architected? I know they own some datacenters, but so does Microsoft, which has a worse service than Zoom.

They just (like yesterday) fixed a bug that prevented Meet from working in Firefox in some cases, such as when privacy.resistFingerprinting was set to true. Give it another go.

They just (like yesterday) fixed a bug that prevented Meet from working in Firefox in some cases, such as when privacy.resistFingerprinting was set to true. Give it another go.

Agree. The big issue is that non-tech people can use zoom. With Jitsi (which I hope to eventually use mostly), you have to be someone who's willing to fool with it a bit to make it work.

If some of you 10x programmers would go on a Mission from God and get it going that would be super cool.

Can someone explain the advantages of Zoom over a FOSS solution lake Jitsi Meet? https://meet.jit.si/

Zoom also has a good Linux client. It's been the least frictive option amongst the well-known conferencing apps with clients for me.

I used it for a meetup to convene remotely and it worked with maybe 6 or 7 people total. Also used it for movie night with some friends. Worked both times. So idk if I agree it's not ready for serious use (we might have different definitions of serious).

I am very curious about Zoom’s desktop version as I have seen it used for sensitive telemedicine sessions between doctors and court ordered patients. I think Facebook’s response was disgraceful, putting the onus and blame on the developer after FB developed a plug-in which is no different than malware.

Real life is full of tradeoffs.

Accept it, and you'll be happier.

I think yes, EU laws are in effect until end of the year, to have time to create new regulations.

University students, graduate and undergraduate.

1 to 1's are totally common and accepted in a university setting. You're generally supposed to leave your office door open (when having them in person), but otherwise this doesn't raise any eyebrows.

Alternatives might be Jitsi and the 8x8 supported by Jitsi tech.

I am using zoom for school with 300 students and it works great. My professors who are not tech savvy were able to use it without problem. Zoom makes recording, screen sharing and chatting much easier than other softwares. Also, I like how easy it is to call in.

Also, at my work we use zoom for everything. It is a powerful software that we love.

> WebEx and GoToMeeting are OK, I guess, and I've heard good things about BlueJeans.

GoToMeeting has had a banner up for the past few days asking people not to dial in on time for their meetings, because they can't handle the current load. My company uses GTM for everything, but there have been problems. We'll probably switch to Zoom.

>One that has been a total game changer for my company is when I'm hosting a conference call, I can simply "Invite by Phone" my participants. They get a phone call, are prompted to "Press 1 to enter the conference", and boom they're in.

Jitsi Meet has this feature

How exactly is this "speaking truth to power"?

As an aside, I hate that phrase. I get it, but i find it cringe-inducing.

Have you tried Jitsi Meet?

Jitsi Meet is open-source and self hostable. Conspicuously absent from your list :)

Yes it is, and even after the UK leaves the EU the provisions of GDPR will be part of UK law until some future government enacts law to change that.

Jitsi Meet.

Sounds like even more reason for Zoom to care. The more high profile they get the more like it is for EU privacy watchdogs to go after them.

It's also very good at handling connection slowdowns. It will drop video first, while audio keeps flowing. If someone loses their connection altogether, it buffers their voice, and plays it back slightly faster to catch up (sounds weird, but it really works).

> Because “it just works” seems to be the summary

I am using it in chromium on linux, and I can tell you it does not just work. The audio is really really shit (constant crackling). I'm basically unable to attend meetings on zoom. Luckily most of them are in google meet which works fine in a browser.

I just tried and it does seem to be working now.

My experience with google hangouts over the years has been that it's a poorly made product. It does work "ok" for 1-1 but the video quality would frequently drop or not connect at all. Zoom just "works".

I'm not sure where I gave the impression of being ok with what zoom is doing, but I'm not. I'm saying this is the expected course given the incentives we as a society have established for companies.

Hoping zoom and other companies prioritize the public good over profits is foolish, and the solution is to align profits with the public good.

You could just install their native app which is available for Linux as well and just works. It's also a real native app and not the usual Electron-based crapware.

Unless you gave "consent" in your employment contract, or agreement to the companies employee handbook, AUP or similar documentation. This sort of "agreement to monitoring" is common in a lot of corporations today.

Please don't use your company issued hardware/software/network for something not-work related ... and something you wouldn't feel comfortable sharing with most of your colleagues. There is already a plethora of monitoring going on out there.

Except this person doesnt seem to have been able to give informed consent, which is what German Law is actually looking for. European employment law is much more on the side of employees than in the US, where your comment's nihilism would make me guess you're located... Most GDPR infractions given have been around this exact sort of noncensensual recording and I think the GP comment should be contacting their data protection office or seeking guidance from their company CPO.

If I'm not mistaken they don't offer Desktop apps and their browser experience has been just plain bad for me. Using Firefox on Linux I wasn't able to get mic and camera to work. While it did detect them just fine, it didn't allow enabling them. I tried that on multiple devices with the same result, so my take is that they consider Firefox as a second-class citizen.

I think the "high-quality video conferencing" is the "hard to replicate" portion. I've used a lot of different conferencing platform and consistently zoom has been: Relatively easy to use, high quality, reliable.

Those last two portions are super critical. No one wants to spend the first 10 minutes of their meeting fighting with their conferencing technology. Also no one wants to sound like robots.

With COVID19 and a ton more people working remote, will there be more competition coming into the space? Sure. But it will take them a lot of work, I'd think, to at least meet Zoom's quality and reliability... and do it either so much better or for so much cheaper to warrant change.

Good if you are not trying to do some weird stuff like, god forbid, fractional scaling on wayland.

They do have a partership. I know RingCentral whilelabels Zoom for video, so maybe vice versa for phone.

https://www.ringcentral.com/whyringcentral/company/pressrele...

Either they are A/B testing something new on you or you misunderstand what people mean by doing it in Firefox. They mean without any native client or browser extension being installed.

I haven't tried it this week, but that was the first thing I encountered when my university switched us to Zoom. I could join by browser in Firefox and see screenshare and video, but I would have had to also dial in to hear audio via phone. In chromium, I could get audio and video together. But, it is a more limited interface than the native client in terms of seeing attendee information. This week, I also tried chromium and saw severe audio quality issues. Joining the same meeting with the native client worked much better.

I understand that our university is consolidating and it apparently works for large lectures etc. For my own use, with small technical groups, we were happy with bluejeans before. It worked by Firefox using just webrtc functionality, AFAIK. What I've read is that Zoom is doing their own streaming and codecs, not using browser webrtc functions.

As an aside, I also encountered sudden SSO login problems in Zoom this week on Fedora. They seem to be defaulting to an embedded qt5-webengine browser and this was not working right at all. Editing their config zoomus.conf file to turn off the embedded SSO browser was the only way I could get logged in again.

> or browser extension being installed. Did you just mention this as an example, or is there a browser extension that makes Zoom work in Firefox?

I think I'd prefer an extension to installing their client.

I'd argue this is more of an issue with wayland than zoom. Wayland seems to break many things from what I've read.

I use linuxmint, so largely, I don't run into these issues.

Many music teachers are doing online lessons now, mostly via Zoom.

It seems that Zoom is the only popular videoconferencing software these days that allows you to disable all the postprocessing on the audio signal (echo cancellation, noise reduction, etc) through advanced settings. This postprocessing is very useful for /conversation/ meetings among many people with bad audio setups, but for two musicians and music signals, the postprocessing is highly detrimental, causing strange audio artifacts and causing instruments to drop out sporadically.

(It seems like there would be a market for videoconferencing software optimized for musicians, where the audio signal is sent at higher quality, given higher priority, and not postprocessed in detrimental ways. And without all the privacy concerns.)

It's because your response is the intellectual equivalent of throwing your hands in the air simply because you don't think you can have any contribution towards fixing the problem, and the only course of action forward is to simply describe why things are the way they are. It's complacent, and it's sad.

It's a lot like someone complaining about Trump being elected, and you respond with "Yeah, but we live in a Democracy". It's not a very helpful comment, and it doesn't get us anywhere except to keep us in the exact same place we are today.

> you don't give up your principles because the cost outweighs the benefit

Yes, a rational person does. You're thinking of dogma. People don't give up their dogmas when the costs outweigh its reasonable benefits because holding onto their belief system is practically infinitely valuable.

Dogmas are hard boundaries. Principles are guiding factors. Sacrificing privacy as a principle in the midst of a global pandemic is perfectly fine in most cases. It's still a guiding factor, but it's of lower priority than competing interests.

Maybe I'm biased but video quality doesn't really bother me nearly as much as audio quality, and Zoom kinda sucks there. Part of it is the codec, but their AEC is so godawful we have to force everyone on calls to use headphones.

Video quality is really only necessary when screen sharing, and zoom does OK there.

Institutional buy-in and support. When your 40,000 student university's administration declares "we are using Zoom for online classes and it's been integrated into our class management system by IT", it just gets used.

And that university chooses to use Zoom over another solution for many reason - after-sales support, SLAs for performance and availability, pre-written API integrations for their CMS and student ID system, guarantees from their sales team about regulatory compliance, and the like.

I say it as a telecom industry insider watching the industry cannabalize itself in the chase for margins because of over-provisioning and terrible self-regulation of reseller and whitelabel programs, and even poorer regulation of service delivery.

This isn't a critique of reselling or whitelabelling a communications platform that provides good value; it's just that there are a LOT of bottom-feeders latched on and hiding in the tangled web of resold trunks and bulk-purchased DIDs wreaking a lot of financial havoc.

I speak of course, to robocallers/robotexters and their kin, which are not new problems but have only been amplified when access to the public switching network became as easy as 'buy a voice over IP DID for twenty-five cents'. I am however curious to see the impact of SHAKEN/STIR.

This all to speak nothing of toll fraud committed via compromised SIP trunks (most often due to poorly configured Asterisk instances setup so an MSP in BFE can say "we sell phones"). Preserving the names of the involved parties but I have seen bills for some consulting clients that reached beyond six figures from one month of toll fraud. The culprit? The office had bought a "PBX in a box" from a local vendor, who only configured it enough to get a dial tone and a phone number from randomly registered CLEC, connected the thing to the public internet, and walked off with a hefty paycheck.

The FCC doesn't really get off the hook here either, while there are requirements and guidelines for inter-connectivity to the public switching network, enforcement is-or in my own anecdotal experience since 2001, non-existent sans making sure you've paid your USF dues. I'm open to correction on this point, if anyone has experience on the matter I'm curious to know what the interaction was like; the rest is mindless opinion.

Taking this last point a bit further and bringing it all home: You could very easily start a "phone company" in rural Georgia with pretty low comparative overhead and sell phones service to an entire community and trivially disappear overnight before the Feds even glanced in your direction with more money than you put into it. Left improperly secured, the robocallers just found a new forward operating base.

If anything I'm aiming to point at the (perhaps unintended) results of making telecom so easy, in a way we created these problems, this is the bed we've made for ourselves in the industry.

Are there any advantages to Zoom over Jitsi Meet? For most people's use case (a small group of family friends) the simplicity and quality of the Jitsi Meet setup is incredible.

I don't get it. I get that you don't like the adalytics-based business model, you don't use the product. But I don't see a rational basis for making that conditional on cash price, which is an independent concern. It only makes sense if you value the product at somewhere between the cash price and (the cash price - the adalytics cost), and $0 cost is exceedingly unlikely to be the exact boundary.

It only makes sense if you make the unsupported leap in logic that says that the cash price is itself promise to not use analytics. But you are willing to accept $0 adalytics-supported products, and FOSS exists and some has adalytics and some doesnt, showing that $0 is not any kind of meaningful boundary.

haha - if you agree to do technical support for all the people fumbling around with other clients - they MIGHT say yes.

One reason zoom is POPULAR with the IT folks - less tech support / help desk stuff. Test my audio is the biggest tip for folks stuck.

> Longer term I think we will see a host of Zoom competitors, because really there is nothing special in the client. Hangouts in particular could easily eclipse it with some work.

Then why hasn't it, despite far more work and funding than Zoom, for over a decade? This is a "I could have invented Facebook" comment. Things are harder than you suggest.

This exactly.

What's really funny is if a VP says, we should start evaluating enterprise conferencing software, get's down the road with the webex and friends sales teams, and then everyone tells them to go home because it's too late when they finally have the roll-out meeting or the feedback meeting - everyone is using zoom already.

Absolutely not! We pay for both. Uberconference has higher latency (test with a click track inside your office with two phones on a call).

Contention on uberconference is MUCH worse when two people are speaking. You get that weird halting sorry I spoke on top of you effect.

In what way do you have to fool with this? https://meet.jit.si/

It is quite possibly the simplest videoconferencing I have ever experienced (Google Hangouts, BlueJeans, Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams being my experience.) I like the Teams experience but the simplicity of just copying an URL from that Jitsi Meet page and having it work within a minute of 5 elderly non-technophile users receiving it in their emails is incredible.

You realize investors are laughing their way to the bank because of the ease of use focus of zoom? The investors in the fully encrypted privacy based video conferencing platforms (yes, they exist) are broke now.

> So for now Skype and MS Teams works fine, or at least fine enough that I don't bother with Zoom. Which brings me to a side question: what is the value proposition for Zoom? What does their product do so much better than the others that I'd put up with this shit?

For me, it's one of the few video chat clients that works well in Linux. Skype may or may not work depending on the version and whether or not Microsoft supports the Linux client. And I have no idea whether MS teams works at all in Linux.

ISTM there could be some opportunities here? First, not everyone is talking at once (else this is a riot rather than a conference), so many of the uplinks could be "nothing new" packets for much of the time. Second, if any participant(s) (even a dummy participant) has faster uplink, that/those client(s) could forward to the rest of the group, in a fashion somewhat analogous to torrent.

(This subthread was originally in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703219)

And it's equally emphasized, at many of those organizations, that all communication older than 5 years is deleted. Nobody wants to be burned by an ill-considered statement made in a decade-old IM conversation.

>simply describe why things are the way they are. It's complacent, and it's sad.

>It's not a very helpful comment

I would think understanding the problem would be the first step to solving it. I'm not sitting here pretending I have all the answers. I saw an opportunity to shed some light on the situation so I commented. It seems weird to me that your critical of me for not contributing thoughts related directly to a solution, when you haven't contributed any thoughts about a solution either.

To each their own I suppose. But consider me thoroughly uninterested in discussing this further, which, seems to be what you wanted from me anyway.

And just to make sure, you're certain you haven't installed Zoom's client?

I'm very confused now, because there have been multiple comments in this thread both confirming it doesn't work in Firefox, and confirming that it does.

I also doesn't max out all four cores of my laptop and run my fans like a hair dryer like all the web based ones I've tried.

We probably live in different countries and are affected by the current virus situation in a different way.

I live in France. Overnight schools were closed and the existing school platforms are a joke.

Beside the fact that they crashed, there is no interactivity built in.

So as a parent of two children I would have been delighted if the teachers switched immediately to Zoom or Discord and I truly do not give a fuck (not that I do not care, I do not give a fuck) about privacy and whatnot when it comes to middle age history or derivatives.

This is this, or me having two jobs.

So except if the software keeps on spying after it is switched off (which would be unacceptable) they can use Zoom or whatever if the teaching process is maintained.

If the teacher asked me to install The Catholic Video Conferencing System my only question would be where to get the msi from. (again provided that there is no spying afterwards)

In 12 months, it won't matter if there are 10 other products offering a comparable service. Companies won't want to pay the cost of switching for something that's "just as good". It has to be 10x better to justify the switch. Consumers won't switch because everyone else will have Zoom. A videoconferencing app is only useful if both parties have it installed.

This post inspired me to actually try out Jitsi but was put off by their request for access to my Youtube profile when the prompt was "connect your google calendar". WTF?

Anyone know what that permission is even about?

I've had the opposite experience with a Mac - Whereby worked whereas Zoom just won't. Which means I'm forced to use the Zoom iOS app, sadly, because $work just migrated to Zoom because it can handle the (insane) video all-hands we have every Wednesday (with 20+ people).

Own the whole thing? While I used zoom at my last job, I don't at my current one.

What does zoom do that something like Google Hangouts or Slack doesn't?

> The answer is: It just works. It's easy. It does what we want it to, with a minimum of fuss.

I guess I'd like to know the details of how its easier than the other of myriad of products on the market for you?

At my company we use Slack Video calls, WebEx, and Zoom, and they seem as identical as each other (I'd argue Slack is easiest since we're all logged into it all the time, but that's us).

> I’ve found Jitsi to be more than adequate

Just looked it up. Seems to be Chrome only. As a Safari and Firefox user, that ends my decision-making tree with two clicks.

Slack for video calls was terrible (when I used it last year).

Slack removed screen sharing, which means I can't easily do screen sharing and debugging on the same call.

WebEx and G2M are much less easy to use.

Not a lawyer, but being a Washington resident (see WA wiretapping laws) interviewing over Zoom (thus not working for that company and no having signed any forms/NDAs/waivers) I'm pretty sure someone snooping in or recording the interview without my consent is illegal.

It is a trap. Traps are especially effective and harmful in panic mode when everyone catches the first bait. In the long run, free software (not as in beer) is much better for everyone. Especially in panic it is essentiel to think thoroughly through your decisions.

Slack video calls don’t work for 10 ppl or more.

webex quality is very bad for 35+ active participants.

Teams etc. have very bad quality during this crisis induced load.

lots of the solutions currently are barely working (google with only bad quality, others don’t have working phone call in etc.

Zoom just keeps working, for everyone.

to put this into perspective: that’s mostly for uses cases beyond 3ppl or 2+ countries, so i’d guess 90% of the users of all tools are unaffected.

Office hours usually end up 1 on 1 too.

They are working on it: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758. Unfortunately, I think WebRTC support is still not 100% uniform across browsers (there seem to be a range of browser-specific behaviour and bugs), making it hard to easily support all browsers. And Chrome appears to be the browser which implements new WebRTC features the fastest, so I can understand Jitsi Meet focusing their efforts on that platform.

You don't need chrome though, chromium should be enough.

It isn't being used just for comp sci lectures though, it's being used for all sorts of things, e.g. union organising, prayer meetings. (And even for Comp Sci it tells an observer who goes to which university and the class(es) they take.)

Frankly I find your comment dismissive of the real threats faced by women and minorities.

To have a slack call, you must first create a slack team and get everyone onboarded to slack.

So sure, if you're all already in slack it's ok. But my five year old niece isn't in a slack team already, nor my in-laws.

My experience is that Slack video is not nearly in the same class as Zoom. Granted, I haven't used Slack video for work in a year or two but I have been using Zoom at my company for the last 9 months and it has really been flawless. I didn't want to like it but I kinda do now. hah.

Wikipedia says Zoom was founded in 2011. Google Hangouts has been around for about the same amount of time, and Skype predates them by quite a bit.

I don't quite understand why Hangouts and Skype aren't more robust than they are. I'm sure this is indeed a hard problem, but the utility of getting it right is obvious, and these are massive companies.

Two days ago I was in a Zoom Townhall Meeting, shortly after a friend of mine who is working at Deutsche Telekom (largest telco in DE) told me that their internal webconferencing solution is crushing under the load and staff is advised not to use video when it's not critical.

Our Zoom THM with 130 participants ran without any issues whatsoever. I'm stunned how flawlessly they seam to scale. I want to work with the people responsible for this tbh.

I'm using screen sharing on Slack just fine.

Except the horrible "trap" is not something many people care much about.

Zoom seems VERY focused on making stuff easy to use.

They clearly are doing things like installing in user folders etc to get around organization "protections". Same thing with the crazy web server launcher. Yes - creates privacy / security risks but also made things marginally easier. Same with the Facebook SDK integration etc. They are going for ease of use FIRST.

HN is treating zoom as if it's some devil software. Part of the REASON for it's success (vs the fully end to end encrypted offerings etc) is because it DOESN'T emphasize security / privacy, it can be installed in a shadow IT manner etc.

That is why it is successful.

I don't think that's true, source? At least I've never seen that as an Enterprise admin.

Based on some quick googling, are you perhaps mistaking Zoom the video conf software with the confusingly similarly named ZOOM International, which does call-center / agent software but is a completely unrelated and a much older company?

'A privacy breach is inevitable with this this privacy violating software, so no point in having privacy' is quite an unconventional take.

If you could post your real name, address, phone number, email, sexual orientation, religion, employment status, performance review, salary, hobbies, political viewpoints etc we can get started processing your revocation of privacy.

Oh you didn't realise your boss was having meetings with HR over Zoom? Sorry, we can't have different rules for some.

Oh and you'll start seeing ads for '5 step sobreity' now since we see you were in the local AA Zoom. Sorry about not getting that new job -- that company ticked the 'no addicts' flag in the selection matrix, and, well, the job market is kinda competitive now.

Not that I know of. There is (or was?) an extension to tighten the integration between the browser and native client, i.e. for use with calendar and email.

As it's beginning to look like my days as a Zoom refusenik are numbered, what is the safest way to use it? Android, iOS, Chomebook, some form of virtualization or container?

> Hangouts in particular could easily eclipse it with some work.

Is this actually better from a privacy perspective? Sounds like abandoning the frying pan for the fire...

On Linux it (obviously) also works on chromium, perhaps it also works on the new Edge? FF would be nice though.

Google notoriously loses interest in what isn't hip at the moment. I think they might notice this market segment.

Also I've done 300+ participant A/V conferencing systems, it isn't the client part that is hard, its the authentication, directory and latency that becomes difficult, and google already has that pretty well sorted.

>Except the horrible "trap" is not something many people care much about.

What makes you so sure?

At what time would it be acceptable to critique Zoom's surveillance practices, in your view? We're not allowed to complain when a useful tool also spies on us?

Citation required, cannot find this in the feature list, support documentation, or on the pricing page.

Parent may be talking about remote control through a screenshare?

It used to be a feature, and then they removed it.

There is some truth to that, but at least the clients are not so terrible (see e.g. https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-...).

From a technical perspective I don't think anything groundbreaking is required, it just wasn't a market segment earning money before now, because why not just walk down the hall, or have a conference etc? Noone is saying a Zoom meeting can replace that, it is just a stop gap.

This blame-the-victim mentality is not helpful. An employee shouldn't have to be vigilant against their bosses spying on them! Basic human norms don't disappear just because there's fine print in a contract. The idea that "ownership" of hardware gives certain people in a company unchecked power over the people who use that hardware is obscene.

Researching a 'myriad of products' takes its own time, perhaps not usefully if you're dealing with heaps of 'unanticipated shit' in a time of crisis.

Zoom is well known, so people are likely to try it early in the process. If it works they may choose to move on to other things. This may not be the perfect process in the abstract, but in reality it's practical.

>> what is the value proposition for Zoom?

Energy consumption. Half hour hangouts drains 30% of battery 3 hours zoom is roughly 5-10%. UX and performance the two major factors why we chose Zoom.

It's actually not that easy with cross team / cross company slack calls, especially depending on how your company set up slack. So it's both onboarding and some configuration to get everyone invited / permission properly.

Or you know - send over my zoom meeting room number - and done.

As other people have stated in this thread everything in Zoom's privacy policy seems to indicate they are sending data to advertisers only as necessary to advertise their own products. They likely:

- Use the Facebook iOS SDK to measure conversions from app install ads

- Send a list of hashed email addresses to Facebook or other advertisers to do ad re-targeting

- Have Google Analytics on their websites to track where people are visiting their website from, i.e. a click on a Google AdWords ad

While these are all not _ideal_ because _yes_, Google and Facebook use this data for their own purposes as well, it's far from _nefarious_. In fact, it's pretty standard fare. Could Zoom go above and beyond and reject these tools? Yes, they could. Does anyone in practice? No.

If Zoom was selling metadata about their calls, leaking contents of their calls, or themselves served ads – then yes, I'd be concerned. But all indications point to them purchasing ads to further the growth of their business.

I think it is perfectly reasonable to seek guarantees around the usage of the above, more sensitive data (contents of video calls, metadata of video calls, etc.) but on the flip side to imply from their privacy policy that they are sending it to Facebook or that they are "in the advertising business" is jumping the gun a little bit.

An overview is given in their blog post: https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2019/06/26/zoom-can-provide-i...

However, I would also like to know if there's more to it. Do they do any server side transcoding? Do they get an advantage by having multiple backend servers connected through good links, having clients connected to the nearest one and routing efficiently through their network? It appears that they use(d) H264 as their codec, are there some technical tricks they use to cope with variable bandwidth (do they use scalable video coding or simulcast)?

Because the security / privacy focused video conferencing apps are getting no traction. Because the tradeoffs for security / privacy (more difficult onboarding for an individual on new devices, more difficult inviting, poorer video quality etc) seem to have scared people away from those options (which do exist) and into the arms of zoom which has made ease of use it's entire focus.

You can set your own meeting room to be join-able BY ANYONE with an ID that DOES NOT CHANGE. Terrible security - great convenience.

Business and educators get feedback if students etc are using other programs other than zoom while on call. TERRIBLE for privacy (zoom tracking which windows are foreground etc) - nice convenience for teachers and bosses who like this.

At every turn, zoom has emphasized things like this.

Think twice before using Zoom. They have a lot of engineers in China developing the core technology. You would be foolish to conduct meetings and share sensitive docs over zoom. Communist party is listening to everything.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/26/zoom-key-profit-driver-ahead...

I think people are missing the fact that ZOOM doesn't actually clean up its act. It has lots to profit from selling user data.

Absolutely not. I actually tried this.

As soon as something goes wrong with your solution - everyone goes, why aren't we using zoom. Literally totally non-techies - that will be their first bit of feedback (I tried to go with google hangouts).

Slack screenshare doesn't work at all at iOS (As in if you are on an iPad/iPhone, and someone else screenshares, you can't see their screen at all)

Where is this requirement to seek alternatives?

Both in high school and college I used PLENTY of stuff that I didn't want to and was never provided "alternatives" if I didn't consent. Seriously, endpoint protection products centrally controlled with total system access control are not uncommon in these settings.

You are claiming I can opt out of all of this if it invades my privacy?

The school had a third party vendor that tracked every keycard access to every lock on campus - I'd def like to opt out of that!

At a major academic medical center, we’ve been using it for massive town hall and department meetings and it has been working flawlessly. Very impressed.

If you are looking for a source of these claims, let me give you one: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/what-you-should-know-a...

> Administrators also have the ability to join any call at any time on their organization’s instance of Zoom, without in-the-moment consent or warning for the attendees of the call.

Not criticizing the timing. Criticizing the tone. My rule in life is politely ask first, if no response then by all means, bring the wrath. Does anyone know if they've ignored the concern?

Everybody assumes every company is a villain these days. Maybe this was an overlooking and they'll happily fix? Anybody ever think of that?

Actually - you'll be surprised at the shadow IT going on at places like this. Users will literally BEG anyone who knows how to get around these systems how to do so.

It's why your banker might use their cell phone for a zoom client when everyone else is on a computer - their work computer is locked down. Govt employees often the same way. You'll notice they are doing the phone call in or phone client vs their computer.

Lot's of companies, zoom included, get in through the user side not the big webex / cisco type sales process.

Yeah, it feels like overnight with this pandemic that "zooming" turned into the verb of choice (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/consulting/comments/fmfdh6/my_old_c... ), even for friends of mine who are non-technical and have never used it before, and this is not surprising. Its scalability during this pandemic has been amazing, getting into a zoom call for new users is as simple as clicking a link, and the "brady bunch view" when you have more than 5 people is better than anything else I've tried.

I thought this was going to be about their hilarious CSP, which whitelists the following domains:

    'unsafe-eval'
    'unsafe-inline'
    blob:
    https://*.50million.club
    https://*.adroll.com
    https://*.cloudfront.net
    https://*.google.com
    https://*.hotjar.com
    https://*.zoom.us
    https://*.zoomus.cn
    https://*.zopim.com
    https://ad.lkqd.net
    https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com
    https://apiurl.org
    https://appsforoffice.microsoft.com
    https://assets.zendesk.com
    https://bat.bing.com
    https://cdn.5bong.com
    https://cdn.jsdelivr.net
    https://cdncache-a.akamaihd.net
    https://code.jquery.com
    https://connect.facebook.net
    https://consent.trustarc.com
    https://extnetcool.com
    https://fp166.digitaloptout.com
    https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net
    https://intljs.rmtag.com
    https://pi.pardot.com
    https://px.ads.linkedin.com
    https://ruanshi2.8686c.com
    https://rum-static.pingdom.net
    https://s.dcbap.com
    https://s.yimg.com
    https://s.ytimg.com
    https://s3.amazonaws.com
    https://scout-cdn.salesloft.com
    https://sealserver.trustwave.com
    https://secure-cdn.mplxtms.com
    https://secure.myshopcouponmac.com
    https://snap.licdn.com
    https://sp.analytics.yahoo.com
    https://srvvtrk.com
    https://static.zdassets.com
    https://static2.sharepointonline.com
    https://tag.demandbase.com
    https://tpc.googlesyndication.com
    https://tracking.g2crowd.com
    https://translate.googleapis.com
    https://trk.techtarget.com
    https://unpkg.com
    https://www.comeet.co
    https://www.dropbox.com
    https://www.google-analytics.com
    https://www.googleadservices.com
    https://www.googletagmanager.com
    https://www.gstatic.com
    https://www.youtube.com
    https://d.adroll.mgr.consensu.org
    https://serve2.cheqzone.com
    https://static.ada.support
    'self'

via: https://twitter.com/jasvir/status/1242518507683639296

I'm with you. I have no idea what people like about it that isn't already done better in e.g. Google Meet. Having to download a program is also really crappy IMO. Plenty of other video chat applications work in my browser.

I mean, so do all the major WebRTC video chat programs. Google Meet is absolutely painless, and I can use it in the browser instead of downloading Zoom's very sketchy application.

Google with bad quality? Meet is working fantastically for me and my coworkers and hasn't been affected at all by the pandemic.

Zoom was developed in China

Look at the top of page 21 of their sec submission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1585521/000119312519...

> The answer is: It just works.

I've actually found the opposite to be true. Google Meet is an example of a product that just works. Zoom, by contrast, pushes you very heavily into downloading and installing an application on every device you want to use it with, and provides a secondary degraded experience in the browser if you find the right link to use it (which you have to do EVERY SINGLE TIME; there doesn't seem to be a way to permanently opt out of the "install this application" nag flow).

Agreed. I find the whole experience to be horrible. Especially having to install some garbage executable rather than using my browser. It does nothing for me that Google Meet doesn't do better.

that doesn't mention the `without noticing` part, which is the creepy not good part. sounds like it's just saying the administrators get a list of currently running meetings and can join them if they want without being invited. doesn't say they're hidden or anything.

Yes, that's what I'm talking about.

I run it, along with other sketchy garbage proprietary software for wook, in a QEMU VM. Or I just dial in and let people suffer through me being on a phone connection owing to their choice of software.

Remote control was removed, which is an important feature for many of us.

> Having to download a program is also really crappy IMO. Plenty of other video chat applications work in my browser.

You know, even two hours ago I'd have agreed with you, but my thinking is evolving.

It's pretty clear from responses in this thread that there is a quality difference between Zoom and Hangouts/Slack/Teams/etc, at least under certain circumstances. In addition, anecdotal reports are that if you do insist on joining Zoom via a web browser (even though their user flow really pushes you not to), Zoom's quality goes down a lot.

So perhaps the reason Zoom is superior is because of its native app. Whereas Slack and Teams's apps are just Electron clients that use WebRTC, Zoom is doing something truly custom. It seems to be paying dividends.

Not everything has to run in a web browser.

> The answer is: It just works. It's easy. It does what we want it to, with a minimum of fuss.

I think the real reason is "it's just what everyone else was doing." All of these apps "just work," as someone who has used a veritable gaggle let me tell you there's scarce difference between them. Except zoom makes it more difficult to join without the app (others work in the browser outright, zoom tricks you into installing).

Zoom I think just happens to be one of the trendiest. But with this kind of behavior there's really no reason to use them.

On a disposable laptop on an isolated subnet. Then burn it after use.

Most of them require you to create an account, often confirming an email in the process, which is a big barrier to setting it up. Accountless video conferencing is valuable if you don't have everyone at your company setup with Google or 365 accounts.

I can't stand that it's only 720p video.

> I guess I'd like to know the details of how its easier than the other of myriad of products on the market for you?

I haven't comparison shopped yet. And, for that matter, I haven't initiated any Zoom meeting myself, except once when someone else requested I do so. (I used Blackboard to meet with my classes.) I just noticed that it's been popular with others, and I've gotten it up and running with no effort.

I am trying out MS Teams, but it's a pain to setup. Multiple emails back and forth to tech support, and apparently I have to go in and manually add every person I want included. From what I can tell, it seems to be designed around a rather elaborate setup, in a situation where you consistently communicate with the same handful of people.

With Zoom, it's "click on this link". You don't have to have configured anything in advance. Especially useful when you want your meetings to be open.

As an example, you can now watch the Number Theory Seminar at MIT, live:

https://math.mit.edu/nt/

(The password is there to prevent trolling, but there's no serious need for security.)

But Google made Hangouts/Meet G Suite only. My university is not using G Suite beyond student email (employees have outlook).

I only started using Zoom now and it solves a lot of my problems: virtual backgrounds while talking to students in my bedroom, recording my lectures, handling large live streams (50+ people), painless set up for non-tech-savvy users.

The only problem I had is that it would corrupt sound from my mic about every hour in a 4 hour stream.

They will be successful, but in part because other chose not to be.

K-12 education uses zoom because it's HIPAA and FERPA compliant. My understanding is that Skype and Hangouts aren't.

Free software doesn't come with built-in cloud networking / server capacity to multiplex everyone's video streams to each other.

> I think the real reason is "it's just what everyone else was doing."

I can't speak for others. But for me, using Zoom is really because it worked better than everything else I'd tried (Skype, Google Hangouts, WebEx, rolling my own SIP server). That was parts: Linux software reliability (WebEx, Skype), limits on the number of people that could join meetings (Hangouts), and effort to talk my collaborators into installing new software (SIP+Jitsi). A bonus is that my employer had an institutional Zoom account. I've been happily using Zoom for 2-3 years now. I'm unhappy about these privacy issues that are being discovered/discussed now and I kinda feel like I should have looked into it. I'm sure there is a bandwagon effect happening, but there was also a real component of it working better than other solutions.

>If you could post your real name, address, phone number, email, sexual orientation, religion, employment status, performance review, salary, hobbies, political viewpoints etc we can get started processing your revocation of privacy.

Eventually yes, I would prefer that I don't have to keep secret of all of those information but I can't because not everyone is.

>Oh and you'll start seeing ads for '5 step sobreity' now since we see you were in the local AA Zoom. Sorry about not getting that new job -- that company ticked the 'no addicts' flag in the selection matrix, and, well, the job market is kinda competitive now

If a company choose not to hire addict than its their choice, its their lost.

I just Ctrl+F'd Google Meet and no one seems to be really talking about it. We've been using it for our meetings for a long time and it works really well. I'm wondering why it doesn't have widespread adoption. You can call-in via phone, can log the minutes of the meeting and seems to "just work" too

Do Zoom have their own infrastructure or do they run on aws/azure/gcloud?

I think it's amazing how zoom became so popular recently. It's even been approved to be used for Passover Seder dinner by some Rabbis :)

It also very popular in academia and reminds me of Dropbox. When I was a student everyone around me used Dropbox. They developed a great product which competes with Google and other giants. But those were all unpaid users and eventually Dropbox moved their focus to Enterprise. Zoom will soon be in a similar situation.

Too little, too late. Corporations cannot be trusted with software.

You have not set up video conferencing in academia then. Or have the WebEx or high-five meeting falter when a hundred people join. Zoom is definitely the most seamless video conferencing system out there, and there's a reason more and more corporations are switching over to them. It sucks that they're skeezy as well, but perhaps it's because they know they have the technical advantage

I had the same question... It looks like they use AWS, though this paper I found is dated May 2013...

https://d24cgw3uvb9a9h.cloudfront.net/static/40580/doc/Zoom-...

My impression is that to use it you'd need to sign up the organization for G Suite. Whereas Zoom you can just start for free and then if they want individual users can upgrade their accounts to paid ones. That helps with grass-roots adoption in companies. It's also a clear "we pay for video conferencing", not "we pay for video conferencing and all this other stuff we don't want to use because we already have solutions for it"

well the article says admins can join "without warning" (i.e., without notice) and without consent. Although the article does not say whether the admin appears on the user list or not, lets assume the admin does show on the user list. Then, it seems in practice to be very well possible to join and attend the meeting without anyone noticing. I am certainly not constantly monitoring the current user list in my meetings, especially not in larger ones.

> AEC

I haven't heard this abbreviation before but I assume it means Audio Echoing Cancellation.

I'm not a teacher but my sister in law is. Her day is now just 1 on 1 with each of her students back to back. They are all under 13.

In general it's not considered a risk because their parents are usually nearby if not actually on the call.

Hangouts Meet is for G Suite users only. No way to use it for free.

Exactly. Even when both people use Slack, if they aren't on the same slack it's a huge pain.

I said this at the beginning of the crisis and first major rush to Zoom by many companies: their start-up friendly business model is going to bite them hard when they have to blitzscale services and there will be growing pains while they find the right non-vc-subsidized pricing model for long-term customers.

I think we can cut them some slack for now as they are under more pressure then many other tech companies. They managed to make a great product - so presumably they'll be able to build the right processes for the company itself soon too.

> standard fare

Aka "common sense" aka "anything that will fit within the Overton window"

Not to be confused with "decent, moral behavior"

Usually Acoustic Echo Cancellation but yes. When it's good you don't notice it (several commercial audio installation products do a great job at it) but when it's bad it's really bad. I'm not sure if Zoom even bothers.

I think assholes that want to make money at any cost are everywhere, in every city in every country in the world. Let’s not be naive. Maybe California gives birth to a higher number of big companies that are also famous and so is more visible.

We switched from Zoom to Slack as soon as we realised we could use Slack and it’s much easier. But there is a 15 person limit so we’ll switch out for something else in a bigger meeting. It’s too easy to switch.

I just downloaded Zoom for Mac, saw that it was a .pkg file. Great, I can see what files it installs before I install it.

I open the .pkg, click Continue so it can run its script, then a second later Installer quits and the app launches. What?!

Turns out, Zoom installs the entire app in the 'preinstall' script of the installer package! Inside there's a copy of '7z', and the app is extracted with that. The preinstall script is littered with typos and poor grammar.

I'm not one of those people who thinks that Apple is going to force all Mac software to come through the App Store, but when I see stuff this stupid...I start to wonder.

Can’t tell the difference between zoom and slack in terms of video quality. Both are perfect.