What are the alternatives?
Like many others, I have very recently dived into using Zoom on a daily basis - I'm even paying real money to use it. A particular driving factor was that the company's "approved" choice of Microsoft Teams was proving itself to be highly unreliable and extremely buggy. I'm hearing stories from many people about how they or their friends at other companies are abandoning Teams and heading to Zoom because of similar problems and/or a strong dislike of its utterly terrible user interface.
This seems to really be a game of Teams Vs Zoom so far as I can tell:
Is there an alternative to Zoom with a better track record and less spooky privacy policy? An alternative that also offers easy access from Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS? An alternative which can display a screenfull of lots of simultaneous video participants as opposed to just 4? (I'm looking at you again Teams!)
I'm guessing there isn't, which is why zoom has become so hugely popular.
Zoom is a joy to use and has worked flawlessly for me and my colleagues (and for personal calls to my family) e over the past two weeks so it's disappointing to suddenly hear a load of bad press about its security and privacy today. I hope that Zoom will react to this and quickly improve the worst parts of its policy.
However my inner cynic does wonder whether Microsoft or some other interested competitor could be behind the new, widely reported and 'strenuously denied', rumour that the MoD has banned the use of Zoom. That's the bit that the major newspapers are running with even though its probably not even true.
This interest seems to stem from a nasty bug from July last year which only affected the Mac version of the client and was fixed in August. (https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2019-13567/). They've only ever had 4 CVEs and nothing since that last one.
Okay, so their privacy policy is too invasive. But I'd argue that logging into any service using your Facebook account is just asking for your data to be harvested. If it's true that Facebook can slurp your data from Zoom in iOS even if you don't have an account then this is bad, however is there a chance this is genuinely an oversight? It sounds like it's a side effect of an API they're using. I guess the proof will be whether or not they change this to stop it happening.
The concerns about recording may have some substance but there is also an option to store recordings locally which presumably cannot be accessed by zoom admins. I don't really see how this is much different from other cloud storage.. Teams can record to Azure - it's still someone else's computer - does Microsoft offer a cast iron guarantee that they can't access Teams recordings?
Is Microsoft's Teams privacy policy so much better? If Windows 10 and its telematics is anything to go by I'd suggest they're likely to be up to similar tricks. After all Teams is 'free' isn't it?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
