"Looking back on my experience of videoconferencing, I still get an odd emotional pain. The feeling is a kind of shame. Not so much for my own wooden performance and the failure of the technology. But rather a feeling that we have all lost a bit of our humanity through it. My interest in these technologies is ethically motivated. I am not at all happy with the banal dehumanisation that results from bad videoconferencing experiences. If, for example, students and teachers can't express their humanity in education, through its technologies, then we're just not doing it right."
"But the default settings of the service are configured in the expectation of trust between participants, meaning trolls can wreak havoc. Some zoombombers have used the screensharing feature to broadcast pornography and violent imagery. "
"As Reuters reports, on March 28 SpaceX sent out an email to all of its 6,000+ employees telling them access to the Zoom video chat service had been disabled. The email stated, "We understand that many of us were using this tool for conferences and meeting support ... Please use email, text or phone as alternate means of communication." The stated reason given for disabling access to the service is, "significant privacy and security concerns.""
"Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan calls Zoom a "privacy disaster," filled with "creepy" features that send tracking data to Facebook even if you don't have a Facebook account and tell meeting hosts if attendees aren't paying attention. Zoom's privacy policy allows it to use what it calls "customer content" for advertising purposes."
"MEETINGS ON ZOOM, the increasingly popular video conferencing service, are encrypted using an algorithm with serious, well-known weaknesses, and sometimes using keys issued by servers in China, even when meeting participants are all in North America, according to researchers at the University of Toronto."
"Zoom has admitted it suspended the accounts of human rights activists at the behest of the Chinese government and suggested it will block any further meetings that Beijing complains are illegal."