You’re right that that’s bad. For me it comes down not to mistakes but to intentions. I might be wrong, but it seems like it’s in Apple’s DNA to do their best to provide privacy and security, while Zoom so far seems to me to have a Facebook-like “growth at all costs” mindset. I can forgive mistakes – every tech company (and all humans) will make them – but their shenanigans with the installer, for example, seems less like a mistake than a decision made with bad intentions.
That said, I also agree with some of the sentiment here that it feels like there are a dozen articles per day posted about Zoom that are nothing more than hyperbole or worse, simply an aggregation of links to articles posted earlier in the week. I say this as someone who has argued against Zoom being used in my workplace and who refuses to install it on my machine (I use it through Chrome): I’ve simply started to roll my eyes each time I see a new Zoom post.
I agree with everything you wrote. The salient point for me is that it’s no longer a question of the technical merit, it’s just a political judgement against Zoom being Good or Evil.
It’s easy for technologists to forget that video-conferencing was terribly, horribly broken not because of some terribly difficult technological challenge, but because the average user simply couldn’t get it to work.
Security always involves either bootstrapping of an existing trust, or some level of ease-of-use trade off.
For example, the calculus for “I need this meeting to start on time” and “My meeting password needs more entropy against brute force attacks” necessarily comes down on the side of starting the meeting in most threat environments.
But in the end I just don’t see Zoom as the evil empire, and I’m deeply suspicious of articles which try to convince me otherwise. I’m not sure where your perception of “growth at all costs” comes from.
From what I can tell, they make one of the best conferencing products on the market in terms of quality and usability. I think the privacy and security issues are significantly overblown.
For example, why refuse to install their client software? It seems highly unobtrusive, it’s not malware, nor spyware, nor adware... it doesn’t ever nag me or get in the way, or randomly start sapping CPU or give annoying update prompts. It’s quick and simple to install and uninstall. Overall it seems nicely written.
I see the “dirty tricks” they had to pull to make their install simpler overall as reasonable hacks aimed at improving their end user experience and increasing the percentage of users who are successfully able to get into a meeting.
Again, I think we tend to underestimate how hard using computers can be for so many people. Making video conferencing accessible to quarantined populations is pretty crucial right now.
Zoom doesn’t have a monopoly position to leverage like some do to pre-install their product on billions of devices. So they need every little bit they can find to make on boarding fast and easy.
They screwed up on their marketing of end-to-end encryption and should be fined by the FCC for that. I never saw that marketing claim, but nor would I stop using their product knowing that it’s not decentralized.
Orders of magnitude worse than anything Zoom ever did. Will it be reported with the same level of hair rending?