Zoom monitors activity on your computer

https://twitter.com/Ouren/status/1241398181205889024

by kangax • 6 years ago

405 136 6 years ago

Whether you have Zoom account or not, we may collect Personal Data from or about you when you use or otherwise interact with our Products. We may gather the following categories of Personal Data about you:
- Information commonly used to identify you, such as your name, user name, physical address, email address, phone numbers, and other similar identifiers
- Information about your job, such as your title and employer
- Credit/debit card or other payment information
- Facebook profile information (when you use Facebook to log-in to our Products or to create an account for our Products)
- General information about your product and service preferences
- Information about your device, network, and internet connection, such as your IP address(es), MAC address, other device ID (UDID), device type, operating system type and version, and client version
- Information about your usage of or other interaction with our Products (“Usage Information”)
- Other information you upload, provide, or create while using the service ("Customer Content"), as further detailed in the “Customer Content” section below

aquadrop2• 6 years ago

These don't look that bad, but what's describe in a tweet (tracking focus app etc) is much worse, it doesn't seem to be in the privacy policy though (or they masked it?). So where's the information about focused window come from?

neonate4• 6 years ago

Your name, physical address, email address, phone number, employment, credit card, Facebook profile, IP address, MAC address, device ID...is not that bad?

deathhand• 6 years ago

There is a feature for when doing webinars that can track focus:

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115000538083-Atten...

neonate4• 6 years ago

That's shocking. How are they able to collect this?

dahfizz• 6 years ago

Is that a technical question? All of that information is immediately available because you typed it in when you made your account, or because of the nature of the internet.

Seriously, you've given this information to any service you've ever signed up for and / or ran.

lloeki2• 6 years ago

Could it be CYA legalese because there’s a screen sharing feature?

blakesterz• 6 years ago

This is the part that is not so reassuring:

Does Zoom sell Personal Data?

No part of that paragraph makes me feel better, and it ends with this...

" If you opt out of “sale” of your info, your Personal Data that may have been used for these activities will no longer be shared with third parties."

Nextgrid• 6 years ago

your name, user name, physical address, email address, phone numbers, and other similar identifiers

My problem with this isn't the info they collect, it's how they would collect it, which this privacy policy doesn't seem to clarify.

As it stands, this policy technically gives them the right to crawl through all my personal files or even listen using the microphone to search for and collect this information.

I'm not saying they are doing this, but the policy is not reassuring. I wish there was enforced legislation (so GDPR is excluded, as regulators don't give a fuck) to curb this. There should be a legal requirement describing exactly the information collected, how is it collected, transmitted, sorted and which third-parties it is given to, if any.

manigandham15• 6 years ago

This is standard language to cover everything in normal use. Billing details is obvious. Profile info is provided when you signup and use the service. The system info is used to run and optimize the calls.

Zoom isn't actively scraping your info, and there's 0 evidence of anything in the Tweet.

jjoonathan2• 6 years ago

Lawyerspeak: "It's just boilerplate."

Translation: "Yeah, that's one of the parts where we really screw you, but you don't have a choice, lol."

CivBase2• 6 years ago

Yet.

There is an incentive to do so and they have taken measures to legally protect themselves if they do. That's grounds enough for alarm, even without evidence of them actually doing it.

kelnos3• 6 years ago

So, all this doesn't sound great, but... the specific accusation in the tweet is that they're tracking other applications that are open. Their privacy policy does not say they do that, and the Zoom twitter account says they don't either[0]. Now, it's a matter of trust, of course (and after [1] I wouldn't blame people for a lack of trust), but to state authoritatively that Zoom tracks other open applications seems like completely unsubstantiated fear-mongering.

[0] https://twitter.com/zoom_us/status/1241768006327336963

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/07/zoom_vulnerab...

gsich7• 6 years ago

All points are so vague that this behaviour might be in either:

- General information about your product and service preferences

- Information about your device, network, and internet connection ...

- Information about your usage of or other interaction with our Products

- Other information you upload, provide, or create while using the service

raverbashing• 6 years ago

Yes if you use the app you need to enter some information for example, profile, login to an account, etc

That being said, I don't see anything surprising on the list.

such as your name, user name, physical address, email address, phone numbers, and other similar identifiers

That sounds like billing information

robin_reala2• 6 years ago

The GDPR’s specific, granular and informed clauses for opt-in couldn’t have been more timely. I wonder how long it is before Zoom have to stop providing services to the EU?

lghh• 6 years ago

Downside of what may be a societal long term shift to work from home is even LESS privacy. I find that ironic, but not surprising.

maxerickson• 6 years ago

At least most work from home roles justify company owned equipment.

I certainly avoid mixing activities (I don't have access to a company computer at home, but I don't use the work computer or network for personal stuff).

kube-system2• 6 years ago

I'm not sure this is an example of that. It is not atypical for office buildings to have cameras/timeclocks/access control which records the movements of employees throughout the day, packet inspection and/or MITM of your network traffic, and a boss that literally looks over your shoulder.

DyslexicAtheist2• 6 years ago

If Zoom would be a Chinese company they'd immediately be branded threat-actor! A company that bypasses security controls on the host[1] has no place in a corporate network, covid19 crisis or not.

[1] see news from ca July 2019

kube-system2• 6 years ago

Yes, governance is of material importance to privacy.

smitty1e• 6 years ago

Goes without saying that there is massive "pattern of life" info emitted by what you attend and with whom.

No wonder it's such a great little product.

thorum• 6 years ago

Thanks for the heads up, just uninstalled.

griphook• 6 years ago

Does anybody have a good alternative to zoom that does not do this?

sahaskatta• 6 years ago

I've been using both Uberconference and Google Meet (G Suite only). Both of these run entirely in a browser without any extensions or applications.

_ink_• 6 years ago

An open source alternative might be Jitsi Meet https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/. I haven't tried it though.

ourcat• 6 years ago

Google Duo?

https://duo.google.com/about/

oever• 6 years ago

https://sip2sip.info/ powered by https://sylkserver.com/

dpwm• 6 years ago

If you would prefer to self host, there's always FreeSWITCH [0]. It can act as a server for meetings. There is a webRTC client called Verto Communicator that seems to work quite well, or you can use SIP clients.

The documentation is a bit lacking, but it's actually a very capable system for unifying voice, video and chat communications – and a whole lot more.

[0] https://freeswitch.com/

EGreg• 6 years ago

That’s why we have been building https://qbix.com/platform

To have an open source alternative. Want videoconferencing on your own site? You can! See here for instance.

https://yang2020.app/meeting

We have a harder challenge of making all the SDP offers work cross browser, but Chrome should def work.

Code: https://github.com/Qbix (If you like it, star it lol ⭐️)

Contact me if you want to learn how to use the Qbix platform. I will be teaching classes and put it online. We are following the wordpress model. My email is in https://qbix.com/about

Quick question for the networking experts here... with everyone connecting from home, what percentage are behind a LAN firewall that you need to use TURN servers? What if you avoided those servers and made peer to peer infra entirely, how many people would we lose?

(Is a complete graph of everyone sending to everyone worse than an SFU once you get too many users? Isn’t it exactly the same number of streams, just in a star topology? Can’t we just nominate a few of the browsers to do what the SFU does, namely forwarding video to the others? Is the issue only with resolution?)

kelnos3• 6 years ago

with everyone connecting from home, what percentage are behind a LAN firewall

From home? Essentially 100%.

that you need to use TURN servers?

That's less clear. I'm not sure how many home firewalls are impenetrable by STUN as well. I worked on Twilio's WebRTC-based audio product back in 2012-2014. In the beginning we only supported STUN. We did get some customer support requests about initial connection failures (which I mostly attributed to STUN failures), but never kept track of stats on what the success/fail ratio was. We eventually added TURN support (after I left that product team), but based on how long it took us to do that, my guess would be STUN was effective for most setups. Also consider that many (most?) of our users were probably behind restrictive corporate firewalls, and I'd expect home firewalls to be more lenient.

SahAssar• 6 years ago

Can’t we just nominate a few of the browsers to do what the SFU does, namely forwarding video to the others?

IIRC this is basically what skype did back when it was P2P, those clients were called supernodes and would route calls for clients that could not be directly P2P. To be a supernode you needed to be internet-routable and have good bandwidth.

Supernodes could be used for hole punching or to relay calls (as you talk about).

See more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_protocol

eyegor• 6 years ago

What does this specifically have to do with videoconferencing? As far as I can tell, this is a general cross platform application framework. If that's the case, what is the value proposition vs something like the current dot net stack?

Mathnerd314• 6 years ago

EFF seems to be the source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/what-you-should-know-a...

If attendees of a meeting do not have the Zoom video window in focus during a call where the host is screen-sharing, after 30 seconds the host can see indicators next to each participant’s name indicating that the Zoom window is not active.

It doesn't seem too invasive, although of course it'd still be annoying if you have two monitors etc.

dmurray• 6 years ago

It seems reasonable for Zoom or any app to know whether its window has focus. That doesn't imply spying on anything else you're doing.

bobwaycott• 6 years ago

I think the issue is not that Zoom knows if its application window has focus, but that it reports focus state to anyone other than the user.

For example:

1. Zoom knows it’s not focused on Bob’s machine, and notifies Bob that someone has begun sharing their screen.

2. Zoom knows it’s not focused on Bob’s machine and notifies Sally of this.

Scenario 1 seems acceptable and helpful. Scenario 2 is invasive and unnecessary.

eddyg• 6 years ago

This feature is primarily used in educational-type settings so instructors can tell that students aren't paying attention to something else.

As far as I've been able to determine, there is no collection of "apps" or other data, just "not paying attention" time.

asdff• 6 years ago

So what if the student has their notes app pulled up? That's a legitimate reason to trigger the alert. The student could also just be playing xbox or something unbeknownst to the professor and still appear alert on the webcam.

It seems like it trades a lot of privacy for something students will evade with no effort at all.

gentleman11• 6 years ago

Is it only tracking whether the zoom window is focused (as in, a Boolean)? Is there evidence of more?

digitalboss• 6 years ago

via Zoom Support Reply: https://twitter.com/zoom_us/status/1241768006327336963

"Hi, attention tracking feature is off by default - once enabled, hosts can tell if participants have the App open and active when the screen-sharing feature is in use. It does not track any aspects of your audio/video or other applications on your window."

Points to this article: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115000538083-Atten...

matsemann• 6 years ago

The twitter thread in the OP says "collects data on the programs running" without backing anything up. Seems like FUD from the face of it. Yes, the privacy may not be perfect (according to EFF admins can see time spent by others in the organization on meetings etc.), and zoom can notify the meeting organizer about participants not having the window in focus. But that's it?

Not exactly the gravity touted in the linked twitter thread, saying "If you manage the calls, you can monitor what programs users on the call are running as well". No proof of that...

Kinda scared by how much a single tweet can make something blow up, without a shred of evidence backing the claims up.

IggleSniggle2• 6 years ago

The more interesting aspect to me from the EFF article was that admins can also see your geolocation, who you are meeting with and when, etc. Basically, if Zoom is your platform for communicating, your Zoom admin knows a LOT of metadata about your people that they might not be aware is knowable.

robin_reala2• 6 years ago

All of which doesn’t say whether it’s the host or the attendee that gets to determine whether this feature is on or off.

thinkingemote2• 6 years ago

is the feature to be enabled by the host? Or by each individual participant?

magwa101• 6 years ago

Yeah, hello, delete it.

skc• 6 years ago

Now is probably the worst possible time to reveal this news.

Because right now, people have much more pressing matters and need to communicate.

thinkingemote2• 6 years ago

Now is the time to be on our guard, much more than in times of peace and quiet.

anonu• 6 years ago

That's messed up. Our zoom usage at the company has skyrocketed these past few weeks. I was marveling at how smooth and seamless the process was. Though I was a bit peeved zoom always steers you to the installed app instead of keeping it in the browser. Now I know why...

scarface743• 6 years ago

Is anyone surprised?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/zoom-defends-use-of-local-web-...

valuearb• 6 years ago

Didn't Apple shut that down?

scarface743• 6 years ago

Yes. And people on HN complained that it is yet another example of Apple “locking down” the Mac for killing an app that secretly installed a backdoor and let an app reinstall itself.

discreditable• 6 years ago

When someone sends you a zoom invite, cancel the download, then click the having problems link to download again. Cancel it again. It will show you a link to join by browser.

A few other meeting apps have dark patterns like this. One of my favorite things about Hangouts Meet is it's web first.

chadlavi• 6 years ago

Thanks for this! I've just been refusing to use it

tympan3• 6 years ago

Discord seems to be better than most others

ilikepi2• 6 years ago

I tested "Join by Browser" recently. On macOS (Mojave), it only seemed to work in Chrome, and the video resolution of the other person was poor, but it did work. Also, I did not need to click a "Having problems" link before the "Join by browser" link to appear, so maybe this feature is being deployed more widely now.

Since you mentioned Google Meet, I recently tried that with a group of 6-7 people, and it only lasted about 10 minutes before multiple participants (myself included) started having issues. It seems like it needs more time to bake, but since we're talking about Google, it's probably unlikely to ever receive that time before they kill it and reinvent it a year later.

saltcured• 6 years ago

There is an account preference option for the one scheduling new meetings whether the join with browser link is present in meeting landing pages. At least, that's how it works with our university license...

colatkinson• 6 years ago

We've been using Google Meet at my work for daily "standups." Typically 4-6 people, lasting 15-30 mins. Been very smooth sailing, even using Firefox. Out of curiosity, what kind of issues were you running into?

userbinator• 6 years ago

What I find irritating is this proliferation of meeting apps like these, all using their own proprietary variations of protocols and consuming huge amounts of system resources, when there has been a standard protocol for it that's been around since the late 90s, with a variety of different clients available: SIP. One could be sent a SIP URI for a meeting and it would work in any client.

Maybe it's like IRC vs all the other IM "solutions", except with an even larger difference in userbase.

Edit: looks like Zoom does use SIP too, but it's not that obvious how to use your own client: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201207626-Video-La...

tmpz22• 6 years ago

Well the best product usually wins in this space. Usually this means well-managed vanity features like sleek design, animations, emote, but also occasionally more heavy weight performance improvements like video quality and sound quality. Ultimately if the standards and protocols you mentioned provided for that, they'd have won, but they didn't so here we are.

barbs2• 6 years ago

Excuse my ignorance but is there a good implementation out there that uses this protocol? Jitsi perhaps?

pfranz2• 6 years ago

At a previous job there was no "blessed" app. We used Mac/Win/Linux and different apps seemed to work better depending on the situation (screen sharing, group chat, one-on-one video chat). Not only in resource usage, but if you had more than one open I'd see issues with sharing resources like video and audio.

tympan3• 6 years ago

The problem with SIP was that without a central directory there was no easy way to find someone. Plus the client interfaces were, quite frankly, fugly, and management decision-makers dismissed them in favour of Skype etc.

INTPenis• 6 years ago

I'm surprised it was that complicated. I helped a friend out with Zoom last weekend and she had been using the browser exclusively until I pointed out they have an app. She's not very good with computers but zoom is fairly easy to use.

Also reading the EFF article on Zoom I feel like these are great usability features. The issue is if Zoom collects and stores the information.

guessmyname• 6 years ago

This is one of the reasons why I always join a Zoom call from my phone, by calling their international numbers [1].

Recruiters sometimes ask me to turn my video on during interviews… I politely decline and move on to other opportunities.

Their app is so privacy invasive, I cannot understand why people keep using it, specially considering 2018 vulnerability [2].

Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about Zoom security problems in Stanford’s CS253 Web Security course [3][4].

[1] https://zoom.us/zoomconference

[2] https://www.tenable.com/blog/tenable-research-advisory-zoom-...

[3] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/

[4] https://feross.org/

GuqLyr• 6 years ago

Looks like Zoom is discussed in Lecture 18: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/lectures/Lecture%2018.p...

scarface743• 6 years ago

Knowing what I know about Zoom and being careful what I install on my computer, I use all such apps on my iPad except for Teams.

therealmarv• 6 years ago

there is now a browser extension which does this automatically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22659216

lloeki2• 6 years ago

there is a setting in the meeting creator's account to have the link right away

jwr• 6 years ago

Whereby (https://whereby.com/) is also web-first and works really, really well. Simple, no fuss, people don't have to install anything to join your meeting. Highly recommended.

smartbit• 6 years ago

We in Whereby are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our users. Our business model is to provide a paid service to users who need additional features on top of the FREE version, and does not rely on widespread collection of general user data. [0]

Interesting. Thank you!!

[0] https://whereby.com/information/tos/privacy-policy/

internalfx• 6 years ago

I use whereby as well, I highly recommend it.

madwhitehatter4• 6 years ago

The one thing nobody ever mentions about this is the Chinese connection. Zoom is 100% developed in China. They have a datacentre in tianjin. Even states in their financial papers. The S1 form that one of the risks is the fact the product is predominantly developed in China. By PRC citizens.

Encryption is also off by default? why is this?

The Zoom App also collects screenshots and transcriptions of shared data. This is fine if you are Facebook or Google.

jfolkins• 6 years ago

Super timely. Even on my linux box I noticed yesterday that zoom, even though I had "closed" the application, was still running `ps -ef | grep zoom` so I killed it.

After reading this, I've deleted it too. Super weird.

flyinghamster• 6 years ago

I saw a tray icon after I closed it out when I ran it this morning, on Xubuntu with the Cinnamon desktop. I right-clicked it and selected Exit, and it did indeed exit.

ETA: Checking the dpkg file listing shows that everything goes into /opt/zoom except a /usr/bin/zoom symlink to /opt/zoom/ZoomLauncher.

hackeerTwo• 6 years ago

True, I used zoom about a month ago and it's still running a process in the background.

tripzilch• 6 years ago

Um, why haven't you killed it?

yadongwen• 6 years ago

Is it related to screen sharing? They allow sharing a specific window. Without knowing about other processes you may not share the window. You have to specifically allow it in System Preference on Mac though.

DyslexicAtheist2• 6 years ago

this isn't the first time zoom got caught red-handed[1]. Last year they were called out for installing a local web server in order to disable security controls to get around the deprecated NPAPI[2] ... this is literally what malware does.

About the same time this story broke I interviewed for a Paris based AppSec company and their CTO asked me to install Zoom. It was really awkward because I had to ask: "Is this a trick question??"

Seriously I wouldn't touch Zoom with a 20 foot stick!

[1] https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI

barbs2• 6 years ago

Does https://jitsi.org/ solve these problems?

EastSmith• 6 years ago

Pretty low move by Zoom. Again. There is nothing in their interface letting users know they've been monitored. Nothing.

fulldecent2• 6 years ago

I don't use Zoom. But I'll assume it's the same as Google Meet and so now I'll complain about Google Meet.

1. When the call quality is less than 100%, it is difficult to attribute this blame to the other person, my equipment, my connection, or the service provider. A heartbeat signal could fix this.

2. When somebody else is presenting, I can't point on THEIR screen. I have fumble through "higher, higher, too high, it's on the bar, do you see the bar?, yes, click on that one, you're right it doesn't really look like a pencil does it?"

yuva123• 6 years ago

Hello all I am taking cless via zoom meeting someone come and type fuck you how can find who is he can you help me in this how can find id and ip address

jvanveen• 6 years ago

Working on a webbased foss sip/WebRTC/p2p conferencing solution(WIP): https://github.com/garage11/ca11

lostmsu2• 6 years ago

I made a simple sandboxed WebView wrapper for Windows, that should address the privacy issue and remove the annoying need to deal with constant "download the app" nagging: https://losttech.software/Downloads/FuZoom/

change_yourself• 6 years ago

Truly, I was passing an online interview on programming position, and almost in the end of the process I had remembered that I could be asked on the design patterns, I opened browser, came to the site with patterns' descriptions and... the interviewer's last questions was: "I think that's all... But I have yet one question on the design patterns."

madwhitehatter4• 6 years ago

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2020/03/25/zoom...

Still seeing loads of red flags in mainstream media. This is not a Secure business tool

Zoom monitors activity on your computer

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