A user has filed a class-action lawsuit against Zoom, after an investigation revealed that the video conferencing app was sending data without clear consent.
Last week, Vice’s Motherboard did some snooping into Zoom’s network activity and discovered that the app has been firing off analytical data to Facebook. At the time, Zoom was pinging over details of login times, device models, local area, and a unique advertising-related identifier.
Related: How to use Zoom
This isn’t that unusual in itself – plenty of companies send info to external parties, there’s no surprises there – but it gets a bit sketchy when it comes to the consent part.
Zoom’s policy says that it may collect profile information when users logged into the app via Facebook, but it doesn’t outline that it actually sends information to Facebook, too.
Elsewhere in the policy, the company stated that it shares info with third-party service providers, but again failed to mention Facebook explicitly.
In a rare admittance of naughtiness from a tech company, Zoom was actually apologetic after the Motherboard report came out, and has said it will now stop sending over the data.
In a statement, the company said: “We originally implemented the ‘Login with Facebook’ feature using the Facebook software development kit (SDK) in order to provide our users with another convenient way to access our platform. However, we were recently made aware that the Facebook SDK was collecting unnecessary device data…
“To address this, in the next few days, we will be removing the Facebook SDK and reconfiguring the feature so that users will still be able to login with Facebook via their browser. Users will need to update to the latest version of our application once it becomes available in order for these changes to take hold, and we encourage them to do so.”
Despite this update and apology, some Zoom-ers have not been appeased. Bloomberg reports that a user has brought a lawsuit against the company, claiming that Zoom’s “wholly inadequate program design and security measures have resulted, and will continue to result, in unauthorized disclosure of its users’ personal information”.
According to the new lawsuit, Zoom hasn’t adequately warned users about data sharing activities, and has since failed to remove old versions of the Zoom app that still share information with Facebook.
Related: How to delete a Zoom account
We’ve reached out to the company for comment and will update this piece with the response.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
