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Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

(blogs.harvard.edu)
1597 points seapunk | 22 comments | 27 Mar 20 14:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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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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impendia ◴[27 Mar 20 15:05 UTC] No.22703382[source]▶
> 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/

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1. nathankunicki ◴[27 Mar 20 18:42 UTC] No.22705546[source]▶
> 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).

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2. e40 ◴[27 Mar 20 18:44 UTC] No.22705572[source]▶
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.

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3. pixiemaster ◴[27 Mar 20 18:46 UTC] No.22705589[source]▶
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.

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4. jedberg ◴[27 Mar 20 18:53 UTC] No.22705660[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>22705919 #
5. wuliwong ◴[27 Mar 20 18:54 UTC] No.22705677[source]▶
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.
6. Roritharr ◴[27 Mar 20 18:57 UTC] No.22705707[source]▶
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.

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7. noisem4ker ◴[27 Mar 20 19:01 UTC] No.22705753[source]▶
I'm using screen sharing on Slack just fine.
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8. ethbro ◴[27 Mar 20 19:12 UTC] No.22705865{3}[source]▶
Parent may be talking about remote control through a screenshare?

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

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9. crispinb ◴[27 Mar 20 19:19 UTC] No.22705915[source]▶
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.

10. thoraway1010 ◴[27 Mar 20 19:20 UTC] No.22705919[source]▶
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.

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11. nemothekid ◴[27 Mar 20 19:27 UTC] No.22705996{3}[source]▶
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)
12. hn_throwaway_99 ◴[27 Mar 20 19:36 UTC] No.22706060{3}[source]▶
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.
13. bchociej ◴[27 Mar 20 19:44 UTC] No.22706121[source]▶
Google with bad quality? Meet is working fantastically for me and my coworkers and hasn't been affected at all by the pandemic.
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14. e40 ◴[27 Mar 20 19:48 UTC] No.22706153{4}[source]▶
Yes, that's what I'm talking about.
15. e40 ◴[27 Mar 20 19:48 UTC] No.22706157{3}[source]▶
Remote control was removed, which is an important feature for many of us.
16. chinathrow ◴[27 Mar 20 19:57 UTC] No.22706230{3}[source]▶
I can't stand that it's only 720p video.
17. impendia ◴[27 Mar 20 19:57 UTC] No.22706236[source]▶
> 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.)

18. jedberg ◴[27 Mar 20 20:22 UTC] No.22706480{3}[source]▶
Exactly. Even when both people use Slack, if they aren't on the same slack it's a huge pain.
19. jeena ◴[27 Mar 20 21:05 UTC] No.22706893{3}[source]▶
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.

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20. jjeaff ◴[27 Mar 20 21:49 UTC] No.22707223{4}[source]▶
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.
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21. gtf21 ◴[28 Mar 20 11:49 UTC] No.22710548{3}[source]▶
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).
22. pixiemaster ◴[31 Mar 20 20:11 UTC] No.22741963{5}[source]▶
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 ;)