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Zoom monitors activity on your computer

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Re: Zoom monitors activity on your computer

#111

Post by IggleSniggle »

asdff wrote: post #102
eddyg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feature is primarily used in educational-type settings so instructors can tell that students aren't paying attention to something else. As far as I've been able to determine, there is no collection of "apps" or other data, just "not paying attention" time.

So what if the student has their notes app pulled up? That's a legitimate reason to trigger the alert. The student could also just be playing xbox or something unbeknownst to the professor and still appear alert on the webcam. It seems like it trades a lot of privacy for something students will evade with no effort at all.

Exactly. At least the student whose window is not in focus is at their computer

Re: Zoom monitors activity on your computer

#112

Post by lostmsu »

jjoonathan wrote: post #63
manigandham wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a choice to not use Zoom.

Sure! Except it was mandated by your boss. Or you have a choice between a bunch of offerings with the exact same screwball terms. This might not actually be true for videoconferencing now that it's getting somewhat democratized and competitive. Point is: "just boilerplate" is just rationalization. An honest person would never present it as comforting and a knowledgeable person would never find it comforting. Of cours…

The receipt from the top comment about joining from the browser works nicely.

Re: Zoom monitors activity on your computer

#113

Post by manigandham »

gsich wrote: post #106
manigandham wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not considered PII information for a privacy policy. They also don't store your files.

It's still private files. So an oversight by Zoom. A picture of you is absolutely a PII. >They also don't store your files. Nobody can prove that. Assume the worst, especially with a company like Zoom. Remember it was about: >They have to name every possible thing they can potentially receive And files certainly fall into that.

That's not how PII is defined nor how privacy policies work. They list potential PII received in standard categories with normal product usage and backend processing.

Otherwise every server on the internet can be sent data by you at anytime which effectively makes listing things pointless.

Re: Zoom monitors activity on your computer

#114

Post by manigandham »

CivBase wrote: post #103
manigandham wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alarm for what? It's enterprise video conferencing tech. They make their money from subscriptions. Your personal data is rather useless to them and now a liability under data regulations. Worrying about Zoom here (and I'm not sure the tweet is accurate) seems to ignore all context of the product and business.

> Alarm for what? That privacy policy is a clear indication that Zoom is only concerned about protecting themselves at all costs. They may not be acting maliciously, but they clearly aren't dedicated to acting ethically either. I'm not saying it's an emergency, but a privacy policy like that should at least set off some warning flags for a privacy-concious user. > They make their money from subscriptions. Your person…

Every company will protect themselves. Why is this controversial? Please list the companies that open themselves up to litigation and show me how that's ethical.

"as long as it's valuable to someone"

This is so vague as to be meaningless. What about your browser, ISP, OS, phone, and the million other services that you use? Context matters.

"The liability is worth it if the price is right."

Are you claiming that a company selling enterprise video tech for 100s of millions and operating under all the latest data regulations is somehow trying to squeeze out a few pennies by selling some worthless data while risking massive lawsuits?

Re: Zoom monitors activity on your computer

#115

Post by therealmarv »

discreditable wrote: post #37

When someone sends you a zoom invite, cancel the download, then click the having problems link to download again. Cancel it again. It will show you a link to join by browser. A few other meeting apps have dark patterns like this. One of my favorite things about Hangouts Meet is it's web first.

there is now a browser extension which does this automatically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22659216

Re: Zoom monitors activity on your computer

#116

Post by Kaze404 »

colatkinson wrote: post #107
ilikepi wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tested "Join by Browser" recently. On macOS (Mojave), it only seemed to work in Chrome, and the video resolution of the other person was poor, but it did work. Also, I did not need to click a "Having problems" link before the "Join by browser" link to appear, so maybe this feature is being deployed more widely now. Since you mentioned Google Meet, I recently tried that with a group of 6-7 people, and it only lasted…

We've been using Google Meet at my work for daily "standups." Typically 4-6 people, lasting 15-30 mins. Been very smooth sailing, even using Firefox. Out of curiosity, what kind of issues were you running into?

No Firefox support was my only complaint for Google meet. After that was fixed I never had issues again.

Re: Zoom monitors activity on your computer

#117

Post by ebiester »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #101
tmpz22 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the best product usually wins in this space. Usually this means well-managed vanity features like sleek design, animations, emote, but also occasionally more heavy weight performance improvements like video quality and sound quality. Ultimately if the standards and protocols you mentioned provided for that, they'd have won, but they didn't so here we are.

Standards are distinctly not products. Also, the thing that tends to win in this space is lock-in and network effects.

There is no real difficulty switching. At work, we use multiple solutions, including Zoom. Zoom has been the most reliable. If one was more reliable or had a killer feature, we could switch in an instant.

Slack has chat history that makes it difficult to switch. What does Zoom have?

Re: Zoom monitors activity on your computer

#118

Post by ilikepi »

colatkinson wrote: post #107
ilikepi wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tested "Join by Browser" recently. On macOS (Mojave), it only seemed to work in Chrome, and the video resolution of the other person was poor, but it did work. Also, I did not need to click a "Having problems" link before the "Join by browser" link to appear, so maybe this feature is being deployed more widely now. Since you mentioned Google Meet, I recently tried that with a group of 6-7 people, and it only lasted…

We've been using Google Meet at my work for daily "standups." Typically 4-6 people, lasting 15-30 mins. Been very smooth sailing, even using Firefox. Out of curiosity, what kind of issues were you running into?

It was a SaaS demo, so we had one person sharing their screen, several participants watching, and a couple dialed in via phone. I was one of the ones watching the presentation. About 10-15 in, a few of us, including myself and the presenter, were booted off the call. Attempts to rejoin were all met with vague error messages about there being some sort of network issue. (None of us were co-located at the time.) I was able to rejoin by phoning in, but the presenter was never able to reconnect on his computer. We eventually abandoned Meet and used WebEx instead.

This has been my only experience with Meet, but first impressions do tend to carry a certain weight. It's entirely possible this was an unfortunate coincidence, and that the service is typically as reliable as other solutions. My limited personal experience with Meet, and previously with Hangouts, does not support this however.

Re: Zoom monitors activity on your computer

#119

Post by hjek »

cassianoleal wrote: post #98
barbs wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse my ignorance but is there a good implementation out there that uses this protocol? Jitsi perhaps?

I have used Jitsi. Last week I did a few pairing sessions where the both of us were sharing our screens and still had our webcams on in the corner and it was awesome. We tried to do a standup with (I think) 8 people and it was terrible - people would randomly not get any audio for stretches of time, video would get choppy or lost completely, it was not pleasant. I will keep using it for pairing since I haven't found…

I've been using Jitsi Meet a lot as well.

It has terrible Firefox support but works decent if all participants are using Chromium / Chrome[0]. Asking other people to install Chromium makes me feel dirty but I don't know any other login-free cross-platform open source easy-to-use video conferencing apps than Jitsi Meet.

[0]: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4

Re: Zoom monitors activity on your computer

#120

Post by Godel_unicode »

ebiester wrote: post #117
Godel_unicode wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standards are distinctly not products. Also, the thing that tends to win in this space is lock-in and network effects.

There is no real difficulty switching. At work, we use multiple solutions, including Zoom. Zoom has been the most reliable. If one was more reliable or had a killer feature, we could switch in an instant. Slack has chat history that makes it difficult to switch. What does Zoom have?

Sounds like you don't work in a large organization with lots of standing meetings and extremely non-technical users. That must be nice.

Many large companies have lots of extremely valuable non-technical users who can just barely figure out how to follow step-by-step instructions to setup calls with even the most point-and-click interface. The switching cost there is extremely high.

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