Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

> 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/

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.)

The first line of their profile says:

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

>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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

Real life is full of tradeoffs.

Accept it, and you'll be happier.

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.

Jitsi Meet.

> 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.

> 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.

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)

> 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

> 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...

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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).

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

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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'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 think you're mistaking "It just works" for "It just works in the way I want it to"

Unfortunately if you go with the suggested methods for using zoom, it is very easy to join a meeting

I hear people talk about meetings not working for them. I can't understand the issue. I've used it for many years across groups that are small or large, personal, commerical, whatever, macs, all phones, linux, windows.

At my new company they wanted to pay a license to use zoom. I asked why don't we just use meetings for free? The answer was it makes us look professional. That's where zoom is. There are dozens are alternatives.

in free gmail calendar, click create a new meeting, add conference, pick hangouts, done?

Wonder why this is apparently not working? I don't pay for gmail. I'm not using it in a domain.

> it DOESN'T emphasize security / privacy

This sounds right to me.

Last week on Zoom, I attended an online conference (https://www.daniellitt.com/agonize/), and participated in a D+D game. Privacy and security weren't priorities. (Indeed, complete video of the conference has since been posted.)

That said, there have been problems, see for example here:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/03/26/zoombombers-d...

Some random trolls apparently joined a Zoom class and made jackasses of themselves.

I think zoom's secret sauce is meeting reliability and quality. You can consistently communicate without audio hiccups and other issues more vs others. Otherwise, why would zoom get so popular with the word of mouth of 'it just works'?

What you're saying is basically a form of 'works on my machine'.

Our town-hall meeting was 12000 (twelve tousend) people and there was no problem. We used it in some special mode where you only could open your microphone but not the video. I have no idea how many countries we were from but we're a fortune 500 company.

We regularly have milestone meetings at a custommer with 300 people joining with the normal setup where everyone can join the conversation, never had any problems with zoom.

The Hangouts video meetings you have access to do in public Gmail/Calendar are not the same product as "Hangouts Meet", which is only available with a G-Suite account. Meet is definitely a more polished experience.

Somehow Zoom has become the Facebook of videoconferencing services.

Zoom, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google could all learn a thing or two from Apple with regard to privacy policy.

No way to view anything in the right side panes (chat and members) at the same time yet when you do view them your bottom pane with the meeting controls auto hides (???). Some panes auto-hide some panes don't. After about 6 people video has a tendency to hang (even if all users are on a gigabit connection). No way to request control of someone else's screen. Also for large conferences (100+) Meet just doesn't have the standard options at all. It's smart enough to mute everyone by default and (I think) disable video automatically now but it's nothing like the features most others offer for large meetings.

Outside the one or two time app install (depending how many devices the user has) Zoom actually has everything you need to get a meeting done. Need a multi user whiteboard? There. Need to have someone control someone elses stuff? There. Need to hold a large meeting and have one at a time raise hand questions? There. Most importantly these don't get in the way of "need to just talk with someone else" being there and just working as well.

No meeting app is perfect for everybody but Meet lacks a lot of flexibility to get it's simplicity and it's not all that much simpler than Zoom for it.

For many people, the criteria by which to judge VC software might be quality of audio and video, ability to deal with low bandwidth, and the ability to run a functional meeting with it. In fact, for many people, while installing an application might be a one-time pain, if it offers better service in some way, it's probably seen as a benefit, not a drawback.

We have Hangouts Meet free at work, available for every single meeting with a single click. Zoom is also quietly available, but we're disincentivized to use it, because the company has to pay extra. We have to jump through hoops to get access. Yet since the COVID WFH revolution, Zoom is becoming more and more widespread. Because, as a VC solution, it just works, and works noticeably better than Hangouts Meet.

> 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.

Do the students not care?

My anecdotal experience: Zoom's audio and video has consistently worked much better than any of the in-browser tools my team has tried.

I'm sure part of this is due to it being a native app.

Once a user is over the hiccup of "download and install this," being able to hop into a call immediately without much mucking about with audio and video settings seems consistently better with Zoom.

The more amazing part is that they are able to handle this unexpected, enormous increase in traffic. I'm guessing it's a mad house there trying to keep enough capacity. But if not, and it is scaling in the cloud this seemlessly, then their infrastructure is definitely a work of genius.

This goes much deeper than add data. The collect PowerPoints and record and transcribe all calls this is. And it’s unencrypted

They record and transcribe all calls why? Where do they store it? Why do they store it?

Why do they have to record calls? Transcribe the call into text then Store it. Why do they need to take copies of whiteboards and PowerPoint’s it’s does not make sense.

Not true in my experience. I have a remote cofounder and we do always-on video for hours a day so we systematically evaluated each option. The absolute best (resolution/framerate/latency) is FaceTime and the best cross-platform is Zoom.

For bigger classes Meet is just not good enough. Unless it changed recently they've got a limit of 20 connections per meeting. Also you can't mute everyone apart from you easily (you have to do it one by one) which adds another problem.

There's a difference between the school allowing tracking your use of their equipment and the school requiring you to use tracking software on your own machine.

Of course, if the schooling is voluntary; either private K-12 or any collegiate level, then you just have to play by their rules or go home. Someone could definitely bring the case against a state K-12 requiring Zoom use though, were they properly paranoid, motivated, and funded.

When you were a minor in high school, yes. Presumably, in college you were 18+ and legally allowed to consent on your own.

You are, of course, welcome to opt out, but there is -- as you suggest -- no requirement for a school or employer to provide an alternative.

It looks like Zoom started in 2013. Google Hangouts was only released in March 2017. When trying to use Hangouts I've had to jump through different browsers because the one I was using wasn't supported.

I also think accounts are a friction. Even though we all used Google services, with Zoom if I needed to hop onto my phone so I could listen in while running an errand I would have needed to authenticate if I was using Meet. I also don't think I've ever been in a Google video chat with more than 2 people. With Zoom we did company meetings without issue.

I feel like VC software will just get more funding by pushing apps/downloads because it makes it easier to collect more data, serve unblocked ads, and nag with notifications for engagement. Not a startup but I'm convinced mobile Reddit is slow and missing features on purpose for just this reason. All they had to do for a perfect mobile experience was enhance .compact a little.

This use of the word security drives me insane; security is composed of availability, integrity, and confidentiality weighed against each other. Having 0 confidentiality controls (hypothetically, not that this is the case here) is not necessarily insecure.

Privacy is not a synonym for security. It's not even necessarily a requirement for good security.

At my previous company there was no official VC app. Zoom was used the most across multiple years even after trying every other app often. Personally, I didn't like Skype because it seemed heavy and they kept making the things in the UI I liked more difficult to use. Google Meet wouldn't work in my default browser. Both required accounts to sign into a meeting.

We were all over the world and using Mac/Win/Linux. So latency was high and bandwidth was often narrow. We also did company meetings every month or so. We pushed in a bunch of different directions. Often apps are only good at one or two of these scenarios, but Zoom was good enough at all of them.

I had no clue until this week there was a web version, but after using all of the others I'm glad it heavily prefers a standalone app. I do wish they had less scummy practices or there were better alternatives.

Google started developing it more for enterprise use in 2017 but Hangouts has been around since 2013.

it kinda works. I've had a lot more luck running massive meetings with the open source and free alternative jitsi. Their offering https://meet.jit.si/ is amazingly simple with no installs and definitely 'Just works' to the point that in lockdown I use it for family catchups, large friend coffee + beer catch ups and all meetings because all I need to do is send people a URL and they literally just have to click it with no plugin installs etc.

> 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

I wrote a browser plugin to do this:

https://github.com/arkadiyt/zoom-redirector

Why would your collaborators have to install any software to use Jitsi? (It should work in a browser AFAIK)

Fantastic. Just installed it now, will give it a go.

> Why would your collaborators have to install any software to use Jitsi? (It should work in a browser AFAIK)

Honestly, I didn't know that there was in-browser capabilities. The last time I used jitsi was via the java desktop client, probably 3-4 years ago. It was a year or so later that I started using Zoom, so I didn't revisit jitsi.

> We were all over the world and using Mac/Win/Linux. So latency was high and bandwidth was often narrow

for me, i think this is key. I've used skype, hangouts, and gotomeeting over the years. only zoom works this well, multi-platform, including my fave, linux, in all sorts of conditions.

i wish this wasn’t so, and that we had good cross-platform solutions. :(

Privacy legislation in America has not kept up with technology. But if you're going to a public school you can at least take political action at the School Board level.

https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/privacy-students

It might not be a legal requirement, but it may be ethically wrong, and university staff who act unethically can face consequences. Student organizations are hopefully not totally powerless, though they are no doubt using Zoom for meetings too.

Guess (or find a leaked meeting ID) and you can talk / show things pseudo-anonymously to a bunch of kindergartners today. Or just observe them and find out aout them. That has some potential problems.

I did not mean to be dismissive of real threats. But I also think an overwhelming majority of calls on zoom could be leaked wholesale and no one would be harmed. And just because they use the Facebook and Google SDKs to measure their marketing does not mean they’re “selling user data” or inadequately protecting the privacy of video conversations. And it’s a very far leap to blame an educator for choosing zoom (a free and easy to use product) as insensitive to the persecution of minorities, when it’s really not a factor for most use-cases.

I can vouch for this. Organizations are adopting left and right - both in the healthcare and food industry. Why is zoom getting more traction than google hangouts ever had?

You could have 6-10 users in hangouts back in 13 for free.

Maybe it was the friction around plugin deprecation (was it Firefox?) combined with the treadmill of deprecations and transitions to new products; within the past year or two I've had to jump between Safari, Firefox, and Chrome to join a meeting--also requiring a separate plugin install. Over many previous years Zoom worked just fine as a standalone app.

> So except if the software keeps on spying after it is switched off (which would be unacceptable)

This is really kind of funny, because this exact thing happened literally less than a year ago. It was technically a vulnerability, but they refused to see it as such and fix it until it was disclosed publicly and they had a wave of negative PR. They literally allowed anyone to connect to the webcam on your computer through an always-on server which remained installed after you removed Zoom from your computer. https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-...

I can't believe everyone has forgotten this quickly. Zoom is not a trustworthy company.

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

Yes unfortunately. Mouses would be better off caring for mouse traps.

> That is why it is successful.

Successful for them but not for us as a community in the long run.

> 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.

I have actually voluntarily shared pretty much everything on your list publicly at some point. Even then the important part is that it was my choice to do so, and there’s still a number of things I will not freely share.

Yes I know and this is why I mentioned this privacy part twice.

What they did is a shame. I do not know yet whether to attribute it to malice, sloppiness, immaturity, or a combination of the above.

We've found Google Meet / Hangouts too unreliable for even small-scale calls (e.g. our daily standups) whereas Zoom has pretty much perfect quality (and the lowest CPU footprint).

Until July 1 the premium version of Hangouts Meet is made available for free to you if your university has access to Meet. This means up to 250 people in a single meeting:

"Starting this week, we will begin rolling out free access to our advanced Hangouts Meet video-conferencing capabilities to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers globally including:

- Larger meetings, for up to 250 participants per call

- Live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain

- The ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive " [1]

Zoom definitely has better crowd control (for lack of a better term) than Meet does. Meet does have some relatively unused but helpful features though like the questions that you can ask as an audience member and upvote others' questions. Can be very helpful in a lecture.

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/helping-busin...

Edit. Add reference, quote.

Let me know where you draw the line for beginning to care, without having asked any of the participants.

I know math lectures don't seem a hot spot, but it's a slippery slope of adoption, and you might be surprised about the depth of harassment problems in the math community.

You're using the exact same definition. "It just works" for you, so you're saying it just works, and you're discounting that it doesn't just work for me and many others who don't want to install software just for fricking videoconferencing, when plenty of other apps do it well in-browser without constantly nagging you to install something thereby making you feel like a second-class user.

Of course "it just works" is a subjective, personal opinion.

I guess I'd rather install an open source browser plugin to do this than a closed-source proprietary application, but ideally I wouldn't have to do either!

Anyway, thanks for the link. It didn't even occur to me to look for something like that.

How do you think hiding the possibility of doing calls in the browser fit into that picture? Surely doesn't make things easier for the people that don't want to / aren't allowed to install things.

I also use the commercial google hangouts, I struggle to think of the differences. I know there's the annoying (must be in the domain to join a meeting without being invited) thing. Uh, is recording only in the paid product? I'm just not seeing it. Maybe there's some limit in the free product? it works for just my group of friends.

I thought Hangouts "classic" was phased out already. But they have extended its life until June 2020. Not many differences with meet, but not available forever.

they made it free for personal use on china a month ago, so lots of preparation time.

let’s see how they exploit it financially after so much free marketing. no evil or not ;)

I'd guess they'll take pity on us and keep it alive longer. Meanwhile in that time they'll introduce 2 new texting schemes plus announce EOL hangouts yet again and then extend it ;-)