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.

I'm with you. I have no idea what people like about it that isn't already done better in e.g. Google Meet. Having to download a program is also really crappy IMO. Plenty of other video chat applications work in my browser.

You might not using it that much I'm guessing. It's meant for power users like teachers, academics, government agencies, people who are doing video conference more than once every day and just need to get things done reliably.

Everyone I know has switched to Zoom. It's a clear improvement in a technical sense than all the existing options out there. We're trying to do our jobs, not make a statement and end up embarrassing ourselves professionally.

So no Zoom does not have to clean up its privacy act. Other companies need to improve their software on a technical level to be more reliable and be more optimized. It's ridiculous that companies who supposedly have amazing developers like Google, Slack, Microsoft, Facebook, can't even do teleconferencing well.

PS: You don't have to download a program -- it has an online version.