Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

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).

That's creeeeeeepy.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Zoom Admin here:

An admin, from a dashboard, can see all meetings currently running. If you "click" into one of those meetings for more details, you can also join the meeting as essentially a cohost, you cannot join invisibly.

You CAN see any meeting title, guests, duration, call quality, IP addresses of attendees, Geolocation of that IP, network ti Mic, Speaker and camera in use, and some other stuff.

YOU CAN see all recordings after the fact that are cloud-hosted, Zoom offers 2 recording types based on where you're recording from, laptops like Mac and PC with min spec can record locally, or in the cloud, everything else is in the cloud. I also do not know and do not believe, there is an audit log for this. This is actually the most troubling thing.

You can see more here https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/204654719-Getting-...

Also, unlike say Google Hangouts Meet, you cannot add a room to a meeting without consent. Meet allows you to force ANY room into any meeting you want (defaulting with camera and sound on). I've seen people who have these set up in their homes and think of how bad it can be.

EDIT-

Also while no one at my org uses it, I believe you can easily see all zoom chat history.

You are clutching at straws here. Zoom fires an alert when somebody joins a meeting. If you're not paying attention, that's not Zoom's problem. If the alert isn't surfaced very well, that's an UX issue, but not a creepy privacy invasion. And if you expect to be able to use a platform which your employer has provided without any oversight whatsoever, I don't even know what sort of problem that is. Do you also expect to be able to lock the door to a physical meeting room, on your employer's property, and use it for your own private purposes unchallenged?

So, what better UX do you propose? Playing a sound of a squeaky door?

On the other hand, I live in a country where it is considered polite to knock on doors and wait until the door is opened from the inside. And no one is straightly accused of idling behind closed doors.