Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

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.

> 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/

> 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 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.

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.