←back to thread

Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

(blogs.harvard.edu)
1597 points seapunk | 3 comments | 27 Mar 20 14:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.701s | source
Show context
luminati ◴[27 Mar 20 22:35 UTC] No.22707528[source]▶
Honest question [not trying to act controversial], especially with all the US-China spat.

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...

replies(5): >>22707715 #>>22707724 #>>22707911 #>>22708147 #>>22708479 #
1. kccqzy ◴[28 Mar 20 00:30 UTC] No.22708147[source]▶
I really hate to mention this, but this perhaps answered an question of mine about why quality of code in Zoom is so low.

When I installed Zoom for Mac for the first time, I noticed it took a while to start up and caused beachballing. So I grabbed a sample of the process via Activity Monitor. To my utter horror, the Zoom binary is shelling out by calling system(3) on the fucking main thread.

I just verified this is the case on the latest version of Zoom for Mac. The binary zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/zmLoader.bundle/Contents/MacOS/zmLoader invokes system(3) on three separate occasions in two functions: -[ZPMBSystemHelper disablePTAutoRestoreWindow] and -[ZPMBSystemHelper disableConfAutoRestoreWindow].

And looking at what the string was, it's just a fucking call to defaults(1). Now I'm not a Mac programming expert but I cannot understand why Zoom needs to change its own preference settings this way. This just screams sloppy software engineering quality. I guess this is what you get when you outsource software engineering.

I would not be surprised at all if someone reports vulnerabilities in Zoom, whether deliberate or accidental.

replies(2): >>22708344 #>>22709807 #
2. phn ◴[28 Mar 20 01:07 UTC] No.22708344[source]▶
I don't know about code quality, and I'm not ruling out privacy or security issues, but zoom must be doing something very right -- their rise to popularity regardless of there being plenty of free (!) alternatives has to come from somewhere.

It may be just anecdotal but their calls work flawlessly, regardless of number of participants, where other apps are just a laggy mess. So yes, their apps are just a means to an end and may be rushed and "low quality", but oh boy do they deliver.

3. saagarjha ◴[28 Mar 20 07:38 UTC] No.22709807[source]▶
Aaaaaaahhhh this is just so horrible. There is specific in-process C and Objective-C API for this. Someone should look at this app. Maybe I will if I finish up what I’m doing.