Accusations increased over the past week for the popular video chat app Zoom, and it took a formal turn to direct the New York Attorney General questions about how well the program can protect users and the FBI warns users to use the program.
The story started when the hackers stormed a video chat group of two schools and pictures or chatting of the group were displayed inappropriately in the United States, and similar incidents followed from storming corporate and individual meetings in what became known as zoombombing.
The founder and CEO of the company, Eric Yuan, apologized for these incidents and promised last weekend to work to improve the safety standards in the application, and recently published on the company's blog the procedures that it has taken to correct past problems and find solutions to address specific security issues and questions that have been raised recently.
General modifications to the application system
According to the blog, ZOOM published on March 20 a guide to help users tackle harassment incidents (or so-called ZOM bombings) on its platform by explaining protection features that can help prevent this, such as waiting rooms, passwords, and mute controls Sound and screen sharing reduction.
The blog continued that on March 27, the company took action to remove Facebook development software (Facebook SDK) from Apple's iOS operating system to prevent it from collecting unnecessary device information from users.
On March 29, Zoom also updated its privacy policy to be more clear and transparent about the data collected and how it is used. The company said, "It was made clear that Zoom does not sell our users' data, nor did it sell user data in the past, and we have no intention to sell data." Future users. "
Adjustments for educational institutions
The company has released a guide for officials on setting up a virtual classroom, and the guide contains information on how to better secure virtual classrooms.
The privacy settings for American courses also changed from 12th grade nursery schooling (K-12).
The settings for education users enrolled in the US study program for the program have also been adjusted so that virtual waiting rooms are turned on.
Zoom also changed settings for education users enrolled in the American Schools program so that only teachers can share content in the classroom.
Security and encryption modifications
The company also said that since the beginning of April, it had published an explanation of the coding used on the Zoom platform, and it admitted and apologized for the confusion caused by its poor use of known encryption tools.
The company permanently removed the feature to monitor attendance attention, and the LinkedIn Sales Navigator application was permanently deleted after it discovered unnecessary data being stored by the feature.
90 day plan
Over the next 90 days, Zoom pledged to allocate resources to proactively identify, treat, and fix problems. It also stated its commitment to transparency throughout this process to maintain user confidence.
Zoom promised to shift all of its engineering resources to focus on issues related to trust, safety and privacy. Perform a comprehensive review with third-party experts and user representatives to understand and ensure the security of all new consumer use cases.
It also said it would prepare a transparency report detailing information related to data requests, records or content. It will launch the CISO in partnership with senior information security officials from various fields, to facilitate ongoing dialogue on best security and privacy practices in conjunction with the work of a rewards program to find and address problems involving all security experts.
As part of the transparency it has pledged, the founder of the company will host, next week, a weekly webinar every Wednesday at 10:00 am Pacific Time to talk about privacy and security updates.