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Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says

arstechnica.com

11–20 of 438 posts

Re: Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says

#11
All they had to do was say "encrypted" instead of explicitly saying "end-to-end encrypted" when it very clearly wasn't end-to-end.

The former still could've been a bit weaselly and misleading (many non-technical users would probably have assumed "encrypted" implied total confidentiality), but what they actually did was so much worse. I hope they get hit hard on that.

Re: Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says

#13

If Zoom made clear to users that connections were not secured to the same standards as competitors, and that potentially hundreds of employees could be silently listening in on any call, I think that would have prevented them becoming a leader in video conference tech. So the right fine here is their entire market cap. That would put them back at square one, which is where an honest competitor would be right now.

Totally agree, and this should hold for any kind of illegal growth hacking.

Re: Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says

#14

If Zoom made clear to users that connections were not secured to the same standards as competitors, and that potentially hundreds of employees could be silently listening in on any call, I think that would have prevented them becoming a leader in video conference tech. So the right fine here is their entire market cap. That would put them back at square one, which is where an honest competitor would be right now.

Is it really different from competitors like Cisco (webex, jabber, ...)? A big selling point of all those is phone dial in which can't be done with e2e encryption (the phone gateway run by the operator has to have the keys)

Re: Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says

#16

If Zoom made clear to users that connections were not secured to the same standards as competitors, and that potentially hundreds of employees could be silently listening in on any call, I think that would have prevented them becoming a leader in video conference tech. So the right fine here is their entire market cap. That would put them back at square one, which is where an honest competitor would be right now.

Some reports say the whole video conferencing market, being very optimistic, will reach $50B in 2026 (considering Covid-19 - https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/video-conferenc...)

But Zoom, alone, already has a marketcap of $117.534B (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ZM/)

I really think there is an unsustainable distortion happening.

Re: Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says

#18
Pretty scandalous stuff. But to be fair it seems pretty likely that any or all of the major players (Apple, Google, MS, Facebook, AWS, etc) to be maintaining some sort of back-door access to the channels they control for spying purposes.

I suppose the risk with Zoom is leaks due to incompetence rather than leaks due to government intervention.

Re: Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says

#20
Why would any company with valuable IP use Zoom after this security blunder, along with the fact they "accidentally" routed domestic US calls via China. Zoom is software developed almost entirely in China, meaning it is subject to Chinese law and the very strong influence of the CCP.

It is fact to say that Zoom could be compelled by the CCP to plant backdoors in software to siphon valuable IP for use by Chinese companies, as is usually the case with CCP-aligned companies like Huawei (Huawei had a cash incentive program for employees who delivered stolen IP to them).

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