
Ask HN: Can I trust Zoom, the video chat app? - GolDDranks
I wouldn&#x27;t normally ask this kind of a question at HackerNews about any random app, but I&#x27;ve noticed that an application called Zoom has gained a tremendous amount of adoption recently; no doubt about the recent coronavirus pandemic playing a role.<p>I tried to install this app on my Mac today, out of necessity. I noticed two suspicious things:<p>a) The app is distributed as a .pkg installer, which is normally used only for stuff that requires special permissions or doesn&#x27;t make sense as a runnable application, such as a user space filesystem or a kernel extension.<p>b) The installer warns me about the installer &quot;inspecting whether the package can be installed on the system or not&quot; and clicking OK, the installer doesn&#x27;t run the normal steps any normal macOS installer would, it just quits. However, it does end up copying Zoom.app under &#x2F;Applications.<p>This seems very suspicious for just a chat application. Such an application shouldn&#x27;t need any of this to be distributed or installed.<p>1) Is there anything fishy going on with Zoom?<p>2) How can I be sure that even if there isn&#x27;t anything fishy with the current version, the next version doesn&#x27;t do anything more fishy? (= even if someone I trust says that it&#x27;s OK, how should I continue trusting them?)<p>3) Why does it install like it does?<p>4) Should I boycott it? (My default stance at the moment is: yes, if I could.)<p>5) P.S. and TL;DR: How can I be sure that I&#x27;m not installing a piece of malware? I&#x27;m not asking about my privacy of communications while using the app, but just about the installer or the app doing malicious things in general.
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jrepinc
Nope. If you can not review/audit the code and compile it yourself you
basically can not trust it.

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Coritenst
There are some simple ways to use Zoom in the browser and to avoid installing
the client

This thread from Tuesday includes details of browser extensions and other
strategies
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22659216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22659216)

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trenchgun
No. Zoom can't be trusted. When I have to use it I assume that they are spying
on me.

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GolDDranks
Thanks for the reply! ...but that's not what I was actually asking. It seems
obvious that I can't trust an app, that does anything opaque, to keep my
secrets. I'm not using it to keep my secrets.

What I am asking, is: is there any funny business going on with the app
installation on macOS? Can I be sure not to expose my system to risk, by just
_installing_ this application?

