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
Dang is doing his job and it is tough. He is keeping this place sound and clean. Dang - nothing against you but I see some double standards for e.g. criticizing CCP has far more weight than criticizing western governments. No one gets offended for criticizing the UK Govt or the German Govt or the even the Indian Govt - but when it comes to criticizing the Chinese Govt... we can't do that, it is a flame war. If people get offended, so be it. If someone from China or of Chinese ethnicity is reading this criticism and doesn't like it...well, tough luck. The onus is on the person getting offended, not the offender.
This double standard needs to end (or as I see it through my own lens). Infact, we should be criticizing the CCP even more so than democratic governments.
People get moderated here for posting flamebait about western countries and governments all the time. I'd be careful about that feeling that there's a double standard. It's a natural artifact of the well-known cognitive biases that affect these perceptions. You (i.e. everybody) are far more likely to notice, and to weight more strongly, the cases of moderation that you dislike or disagree with. That gives you a generalized image of what goes on here. But that image is just an inverse reflection of your own views. It's not based on the data as a whole. People with opposite views have the opposite image. To take the current topic, for example, they say that HN has an extremely anti-China bias, any comments that try to defend China or Chinese people instantly get downvoted, the mods are in on the racism, and so on. They have the opposite image to yours, but they have it for the same reason you do: they feel very strongly about the issue, and so when they run across instances in the data stream that touch (i.e. hurt) those feelings, it makes a strong impression. Those strong impressions accrue into an image of bias. But the data stream has more than enough data points to make every such impression. That's simply what you get at scale.
More explanation and links in this recent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22723626