Is The Zoom App Safe Or Not? Heres What Its India Head Has To Say

Chandigarh — As millions of people across the world work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, video-conferencing app Zoom has skyrocketed in popularity . The app is simple to use and has a free version, making it the preferred destination for professional as well as personal needs. 

But along with the surge in users, Zoom has also been dealing with a backlash over its lax security features, especially since it’s used by many schools to conduct online classes for students. HuffPost India reported on 21 April that a Chandigarh region school has asked parents to sit with their children during online classes after a porn movie began playing during a session.

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Earlier this month, Eric Yuan, the billionaire founder and CEO of Zoom, apologized to users, saying that the company still had to do a lot of work to fix the lapses. 

The Indian government has banned its officers from using Zoom for official purposes, and countries such as Taiwan do not allow the app to be used for online classes anymore. Many companies have also banned employees from using it for corporate purposes.

Sameer Raje, India head of  Zoom Video Communications, in conversation with HuffPost India said that the app had primarily been designed for enterprise usage and the company had not anticipated the level of demand the COVID-19 pandemic would cause.

“What we saw during COVID 19 was users as small as five and six years old using our service. Someone sitting in New York is getting married on Zoom and got the marriage registered. We never anticipated this sort of situation,” he said in an interview. 

Raje also spoke about the steps the company is taking to educate young or non-tech savvy users on the app, and whether Zoom meetings have end-to-end encryption or not.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

While Zoom has been seeing unprecedented global growth due to the pandemic, it is also dealing with criticism about its inadequate security and privacy measures. How are you dealing with the situation? 

In Zoom, we always followed the culture of caring about people. The company was founded with a goal to deliver happiness. However, during the COVID-19 situation, it was quite unforeseen that there was a sudden spike in the usage and this also brought in a different set of users. Zoom was predominantly designed for enterprise usage where there was a discipline and a set of protocols to follow while using the technology that governs you and your devices. But what we saw during COVID 19 was users as small as five and six years old using our service. Someone sitting in New York is getting married on Zoom and got the marriage registered. We never anticipated this sort of situation. 

So, do you mean that Zoom was never meant for individual consumers and now suddenly hundreds of million people, including young kids and homemakers, are using it every day without being challenged by any of your safety protocols? Don’t you think it could be a dangerous tool in the hands of kids and not-so-tech-savvy people, with their privacy being compromised?

So here we found two issues that ignited the concern for privacy and security. Firstly, we need to understand that the new set of users who have come on board, they need to be coached, educated, and guided in terms of how to remain secure in the cyber world. What are the best safety protocols—like when you go out of the house, you coach your child on how to lock the door from inside and the good practices to remain safe while they are alone in the house? So here we have taken this responsibility to coach and educate the schools and the students through our webinars. 

Also, the kids sometimes forget to follow the safety protocol. So in this scenario, you take preventive steps like installing an automated door closure. So recently, we have forced some safety protocols, especially in classroom sessions. For example, you cannot start a meeting without a password. We have enabled meeting rooms so that everyone should seek permission from the teacher to enter the session. Also, the host has been given the facility to limit the screen-sharing facility while hosting kids less than 16 years of age. We have also made some safety features mandatory to pop up in case the teacher forgets to activate them during the live session.

What is the biggest challenge you are facing currently while managing such huge traffic on a daily basis?  Is it handling untrained users or upgrading your security protocols to accommodate them? 

Zoom is a holistic collaboration and unified communication platform. What I mean is that it does not allow you to collaborate via the Zoom app but bring in traditional video conferencing systems, phone systems, mobility and your own devices features etc. So, this platform was predominantly designed for the smallest to the largest enterprises running on hundreds of thousands of desktops. We even had individual consumers using it on a daily basis but we did not anticipate that the number will rise from 10 million to 200 million in less than two months. We are upgrading our security protocols to accommodate users of every age group. 

Can you tell us which sectors have adopted the usage of the Zoom app in a big way, especially in India? 

Talking about our video first frictionless communication platform, our customer base always has been across sectors. However, the COVID-19 lockdown has given us a big boost in multiple sectors where organizations were forced to work from home under the Business Continuity Plan (BCP). 

Also, another big boost in the individual customer base came from individual tutors and coaching centers who have switched to Zoom to interact with their students on a daily basis. In addition to this, we have permitted schools to adopt our K-12  program and use our platform without any cost restrictions. 

In this program, we have removed the restriction of 40 minutes meeting duration and allowed the schools to conduct classes for unlimited periods. However, if they need any integration with their backend software, their learning management systems or other features, they can opt for our education platform. 

There is a lot of confusion about whether Zoom meetings support end-to-end encryption. Can you confirm this? 

So if anyone is using his laptop, phone or any device to join Zoom meeting through Zoom clients, it is entirely encrypted. The encryption debate starts when you bring in a third-party tool into it. We are a collaboration platform and so when you make a phone call to join a Zoom meeting to a Zoom cloud, it is not encrypted.  It gets encrypted only from the Zoom cloud. In other words, when you bring in additional tools and additional platforms like Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) audio conferencing into the  Zoom cloud,  that is where the encryption pattern changes. 

Recently, there were a lot of controversies when Zoom ”mistakenly ″ routed some calls from North America through Chinese servers as a back-up plan to overcome congestion. With unprecedented consumer growth, how safe is users’ data on your servers? 

This is in continuation to our growth plans in India. Out of the 17 data centers out there in the world, two of the data centers are located at Mumbai and Hyderabad in India. So all the paid users, when they start accessing the Zoom meetings, the first data center that they go to is India. It’s nowhere else. The moment you don’t get a response, it goes to another server which could be in the US and that happens in a millisecond. But it’s very rare that it jumps from one server to another. Also, we are partners with the two largest telcos Airtel and Tata Telecommunications. We use their infrastructure to carry our traffic. Also, another initiative we have launched for the first time in the history of collaboration, we have given the ability to our paid users to actually select the country or the region where they want to route their data. So if you do not want your data to be routed through some specific country, you can simply deselect it. 

Along with the surge in users, Zoom has reason to worry as many countries and companies have banned the app. Has this ban eaten away your global market share?  

As our founder and Chief Executive officer, Eric Yuan puts it, 10 years down the line when people will talk about COVID-19 and life amidst lockdown, we would like to be remembered as a company that helped mankind. We enabled people to connect during the pandemic. 

Also, as Eric mentioned, we made certain mistakes but we rectified them in less than 24 hours. We released three versions in less than 10 days. 

The most important is the transparency we have maintained with our paid customers. We encourage them to discuss their concerns with us and try to rectify it. Along with criticism,  we are also getting a lot of blog posts and emails applauding our response and it is quite encouraging for us. 

What is your Indian market share? Do you have any expansion plans? 

Presently we are in a quiet period and will not be able to share many details on our  Indian market share. But surely we are planning an expansion in India in line with our global expansion plan. All I can say is that I see the grass growing every day and it seems encouraging.