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Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

(blogs.harvard.edu)
1597 points seapunk | 1 comments | 27 Mar 20 14:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.231s | 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. floatingatoll ◴[27 Mar 20 15:36 UTC] No.22703760[source]▶
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.