Brand-new reports on the efforts of school districts to quickly pivot to online learning shows how fickle some of the emerging videoconferencing trends can be.
CNet reports New York City’s Department of Education has asked schools to move away from using the Zoom platform and toward Microsoft Teams. The reason that New York and other states are looking at critically at Zoom, according to reporter Sean Keane, has to do with a lack of security, where the phenomenon of “zoom bombing” (virtually crashing a Zoom meeting) has become commonplace, and some experts warn that Zoom connections may not be end to end encrypted as many users had assumed.
“New York Attorney General Letitia James sent a letter demanding action from the company, while security researchers discovered bugs that might let hackers seize control of webcams and microphones on Zoom users’ Macs,” Keane reports.
Prior to these revelations, Zoom boomed: user volume reportedly jumped 2000% last month, as coronavirus moved workflows toward the cloud, and resulted in a dramatic stock value gain.
Now, CEO Eric Yuan has said that the company will prioritize security fixes.
“For the past several weeks, supporting this influx of users has been a tremendous undertaking in our sole focus,” Yuan reportedly said in response to security concerns. “However, we recognize that we have fallen short of the community’s and our own privacy and security expectations.”
Also, Zoom is not doing nothing to quell the qualms:
“Zoom will enact a 90-day feature freeze, meaning it’ll stop adding new features, so it can address those privacy issues,” Keane wrote April 2. “It’ll also (sic) ‘a comprehensive review with third-party experts’ to make sure it’s handling the security of its consumer users appropriately, along with releasing a transparency report outlining requests for user data from law enforcement and governments.”
Despite this mea culpa, it remains to be seen how the company will emerge from a situation where users are sowing seeds of doubt. Track ZM on the market and look at what’s coming in to fill the void.