• Video calls.Zoom, essential in the pandemic but with more and more competition
  • Apps.Zoom agrees to improve the security and privacy of 200 million users

On June 4, a New York-based Chinese activist Zhou Fengsuo held a Zoom meeting with 250 participants to discuss the Tiananmen protests. He chose Zoom because, unlike other social platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter, the use of the video conferencing application is not restricted or censored in China.

But a few days later, Fengsuo discovered that his Zoom account had been blocked by the company itself. It was not the only case. At the request of the Beijing government, the Silicon Valley company had also blocked the accounts of Lee Cheuk-yan and Wang Dan, residents of Hong Kong, for planning three meetings on the same subject, an activity that is considered illegal within the borders. China.

All three accounts have been re-enabled, but have put Zoom at the center of a new controversy. After numerous setbacks in managing the security and privacy of users, the application, which has become almost essential during the pandemic, now faces the same problem that for years has been chasing companies like Google or Facebook: China is a succulent market, but that forces to play with the rules that are set from Beijing, often opposed to those that are in the West in regards to privacy and censorship.

"The reality is that Zoom operates in more than 80 countries and continues to expand, which requires compliance with local laws, even when Zoom seeks to promote the open exchange of ideas," they explain from the company, founded in the USA. by Eric Yuan, a Chinese migrant who worked as an engineer at Cisco before launching this application.

To ensure its presence in the market, Zoom will now follow new procedures. The company will not block accounts at the request of the Chinese government if these accounts belong to individuals who are not in the country, one of the mistakes it acknowledges having made in this situation .

In addition, it will enable the possibility of blocking meeting attendees by region so that, if the Government requests it, Chinese users cannot access certain sessions. One of the reasons Zoom had to cancel three of the four meetings held by Zhou Fengsuo, Lee Cheuk-yan, and Wang Dan was precisely because they didn't have the ability to block only certain attendees based on their IP number.

The company has also acknowledged in the past that some of the calls and meetings may have flowed through the company's servers in China. Zoom's infrastructure is global, but by law, China requires that its users' data be on servers hosted in the country itself. By routing third-country calls through those servers, Zoom could have made it easier for the Chinese authorities to access some participant data or even conversations, as the company does not currently offer encrypted end-to-end meetings. It will do so shortly, but only for paid users .

Zoom has ensured that since April 18, meetings created by companies and users outside of China do not go through these servers and paid users from around the world can choose the specific data center that manages their conferences. The tool, created for corporate users and large companies, has had to face a flood of new users in recent months due to the needs for remote work and distance education that the coronavirus has imposed. The number of users has grown almost 50%, with more than 300 million daily participants in conferences and meetings.

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