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Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

(blogs.harvard.edu)
1597 points seapunk | 5 comments | 27 Mar 20 14:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.846s | source
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mikestew ◴[27 Mar 20 14:46 UTC] No.22703219[source]▶
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.

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1. michaelbrooks ◴[27 Mar 20 15:34 UTC] No.22703733[source]▶
Have you taken a look at [0]WhereBy? It's been recommended as a great alternative to Zoom.

[0]https://whereby.com/

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2. Dunedan ◴[27 Mar 20 17:43 UTC] No.22704996[source]▶
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.
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3. zimpenfish ◴[27 Mar 20 18:39 UTC] No.22705524[source]▶
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).
4. jwr ◴[27 Mar 20 22:15 UTC] No.22707404[source]▶
I use Whereby every day and it's fantastic for small meetings. People don't have to install anything, just click a link and it works.
5. ksec ◴[27 Mar 20 23:00 UTC] No.22707673[source]▶
I think whereby deserve to get more attention from the HN crowd, although the Founder did say they are working hard on the extreme interest for the past few days. So may be give them a few more days before a separate submission on HN.