Zoom app accused of data theft: Case filed in Court against zoom for sharing data

There is a worldwide lockdown situation due to coronavirus. Emphasis is being laid on work from home and social distancing. Most companies have people working from home. In such a situation, video conferencing app is being used to maintain meetings and communication. One such video conferencing app zoom which is being liked a lot, in it 100 people can do video conferencing simultaneously for free. But now this app is facing allegations of illegally sharing the personal data of the users to other companies including Facebook. A lawsuit is filed against Zoom in a court of California on Monday. During the court hearing, the company failed to explain why the users’ data was shared with Facebook and other companies without permission.

What is Zoom?

Zoom is a free video conferencing app. Through this, users can talk with up to 100 people at a time. The user interface of the app is easy due to which every person uses it. The app also offers one-to-one meetings and 40-minute group calling. It is both an iOS and Google Play store app. 

Leaking client’s privacy  

It has been found that the video conferencing in zoom is not encrypted end to end  which can cause leak of the data in between and can hinder one’s privacy. According to the motherboard report, the zoom app is leaking the client’s email address and its details. Fearing privacy leaks, Apple had to make arrangements to secure millions of its Mac computers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently warned that this app allows administrators to track people’s movements. Zoom was also accused of quietly sending data to Facebook about users’ habits. According to the motherboard report, it notifies Facebook whenever iOS operator opens an android app. This way data gets leaked to Facebook. After this allegation, the founder of Zoom has said that the company is reviewing the feature which is sharing the users’ data with Facebook. However, now the company has removed this feature of data sharing with Facebook.

Zoom app is downloaded 100 million times in India

App Annie, a company that works on app data, has released a report. According to the report, between March 14 and March 21, only video conferencing apps were downloaded 62 million times worldwide. This is 90 per cent more than the weekly average business app downloading in 2019. This is the fastest growth in any app category so far on iOS and Google Play Store. The downloading mainly consists of Google’s Hangout Meet, Microsoft Teams and Zoom Cloud Meetings. According to the report, the highest zoom video conferencing app has been downloaded in February and March. In India, it has been growing very fast and has been downloaded 100 million times from Google Play Store. In the record week of March 14 to 21, it was downloaded 14 times more than the average weekly downloading in the US in this quarter. 20 times the weekly average in Britain, 22 times in France, 17 times in Germany,

The founder of Zoom’s founder Yuan

Its founder Eric Yuan has also been in the news all over the world. Although the yuan also belonged to China in the midst of the Corona crisis, he is now American. Yuan’s visa application was rejected by the US eight times. In the nineties, Eric first heard Bill Gates speaking about the Internet. Since then he was attracted to this field. In 1997, he got a job as an engineer with video conferencing software company WebEx on the strength of computer coding skills. Yuan started his company in 2011 with 40 engineers and launched Zoom. The company had 1700 employees by 2018 and the company’s revenue has crossed $ 33 million.