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Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

(blogs.harvard.edu)
1597 points seapunk | 4 comments | 27 Mar 20 14:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.632s | 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. imagiko ◴[27 Mar 20 20:05 UTC] No.22706304[source]▶
I just Ctrl+F'd Google Meet and no one seems to be really talking about it. We've been using it for our meetings for a long time and it works really well. I'm wondering why it doesn't have widespread adoption. You can call-in via phone, can log the minutes of the meeting and seems to "just work" too
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2. detaro ◴[27 Mar 20 20:14 UTC] No.22706386[source]▶
My impression is that to use it you'd need to sign up the organization for G Suite. Whereas Zoom you can just start for free and then if they want individual users can upgrade their accounts to paid ones. That helps with grass-roots adoption in companies. It's also a clear "we pay for video conferencing", not "we pay for video conferencing and all this other stuff we don't want to use because we already have solutions for it"
3. squeaky-clean ◴[27 Mar 20 21:06 UTC] No.22706903[source]▶
Requires a G Suite enterprise account. It also doesn't help that Google Hangouts Meet and Google Hangouts are two similarly named and looking but incompatible products.

https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/7317473

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4. chinathrow ◴[27 Mar 20 21:23 UTC] No.22707031[source]▶
No, it requires G Suite Basic or better.