Zoom's engineering team is based in China - the product is primarily built out of there. [1]
What guarantee is there that the CCP is not intercepting/backdooring all video communications? Especially in current situations, where so much sensitive information is being discussed via Zoom?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/26/zoom-key-profit-driver-ahead...
Surveillance prospects, doesn't matter where they originate - US or China or Country X - need to be discussed and examined. But apparently, saying anything against China on HN is an automatic ban for creating a flame war. We've become too soft. Obviously personal attacks and racism is not tolerable. But, I would personally (some may disagree) say that we should also criticize bad parts of culture too...that's for another day or a different forum.
Can we just get past the my country your country bullshit on HN and talk about privacy implications especially from the world's largest surveillance network? It is one thing to be spied upon for advertisement tracking, an entirely another to be spied upon by a brutal authoritarian government. Fearlessly criticizing CCP or the NSA, or Israeli intelligence agency or whatever... should be one of the most important things to talk about on "Hacker" news forum.
I am gonna fire off some anon emails to WSJ/NYTimes/WaPo/Guardian to create some awareness and perhaps they can dig further into Chinese influence in using Zoom. I am deeply concerned. The entire world has given up video/audio/screen/application privacy in a snap... for the data might be stored in Tianjin datacenter, needless to say whose keys are in the hands of CCP - I guarantee that but cannot provide proof.
Edit: past comments that were downvoted (and flagged): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22657794
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22684767
In case it's not clear, I'm with you. Either you're in a position to state in what capacity you work or you're not. In the latter, don't hint at it. Just leave that out. It's useless, and more likely to make people doubt the validity of the vague claim.
The organizations that are really that sinister will smash you just as hard for hinting that they're doing bad things under cover of darkness as they will for outright saying it.
If you can hint at it without being smacked down hard, the org you say you fear only has aspirations of evil world domination; it's not there yet.
Of course, maybe OP was scrubbed for hinting at it and we'll never know. Let it be a warning to others who would make vague hints of disclosure regarding their evil overlords.
By all means, ignore it.