Why do you believe that paying for a product makes it secure?
It doesn't. However if you are using a product or service which costs a non-negligible amount to provide and you're not paying directly for it then you need to start thinking about how it is being funded. Perhaps it is being provided by kind-hearted rich people, but perhaps it's not. In the case of Zoom (or Google, or Facebook, or ...) it turns out that it is indeed not.
One thing that paying for a product or service can (but may not) achieve is to align the interests of the people paying for the service and those being paid to provide it: if you, as the payer, discover that the people you are paying are, say, leaking your data, then you stop paying and if enough people do this they go bankrupt.
Obviously this does not always work very well. And equally obviously sometimes it really is kind-hearted (relatively) rich people, witness the entire open source movement.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
