So we're all doing the Zoom thing now, I guess. Every meeting, every class, every family check-in call is suddenly a little grid of faces on a screen, and for about two weeks it felt like Zoom could do no wrong. Then this week happened, and it turns out the app that ate the internet has a few skeletons.
The one that actually made me sit up was the Motherboard piece from a few days back (Joseph Cox, if you want to go read the original, you should) showing that Zoom's iOS app was sending analytics data to Facebook every time you opened it, even if you'd never touched a Facebook account in your life. Device model, time zone, phone carrier, a unique advertiser identifier, all of it, shipped off the moment the app launched. Not because you logged in with Facebook. Just because the Facebook SDK was sitting in there doing its thing in the background. Zoom pulled the code out of the iOS app within about a day of the story going up, which, fine, credit where it's due, thats a fast fix. But the fact that it was ever there is the part that bugs me. Nobody signed up for "your video call app quietly phones home to an ad network." Thats not a bug, thats a decision somebody made at some point and never revisited.
And that's before you even get to the zoombombing stuff. If you haven't seen the term yet you will — its what people are calling it when randoms crash open Zoom meetings that don't have a password or a waiting room, usually to blast porn or slurs at a class full of ninth graders. Its been happening at schools that scrambled to move classes online in like a week and didn't have time to think about meeting hygiene, and its ugly. I saw a screenshot going around of a high school English class getting hit with this on Friday and it made my stomach drop a little, honestly, thinking about how many teachers out there are just trying to keep some normalcy going for their students and getting this dumped on them instead. The FBI's Boston field office actually put out a public warning about it this week, specifically naming video-teleconferencing hijacking as a thing to watch for, which is not a sentence I expected to read in 2020 back in January.
Now, none of this is really "Zoom is uniquely evil," to be clear. A lot of it is just what happens when a tool built for scheduled corporate meetings between adults who already know each other suddenly gets used by three hundred million people overnight for everything from kindergarten story time to Thanksgiving-adjacent family calls to actual, no-kidding therapy sessions. Nobody stress tests a product for that. New York's attorney general apparently sent Zoom a letter this week asking exactly how they're handling all this new load and whether their security practices have kept pace, and I don't think thats an overreaction. When a piece of software goes from "thing my company's IT department picked" to "the substrate half the country is now living its entire social and professional life through" in about three weeks, somebody should probably be asking questions.
My own experience with it has been fine so far, for what its worth — I've had two work calls and one truly chaotic attempt at a virtual game night with people I mostly haven't seen in person since college. But I did go turn on the waiting room setting and slap a password on my recurring meeting link the second I heard about the school stuff, and I'd tell anyone reading this to do the same, it takes about ninety seconds. Screen Share should probably default to host-only too, honestly, I don't know why that wasn't already the case.
I don't think this kills Zoom or anything. People aren't going back to whatever they were using before (I genuinely could not tell you what my office used pre-Zoom, GoToMeeting maybe, some Wednesday in early March feels like it happened in a different decade at this point). But I do think this is the moment where "which video app do you trust with your face and your kid's classroom" stops being a boring IT question and turns into something people actually have opinions about. Worth keeping an eye on what changes here over the next few weeks, because I get the sense this isn't the last story like this one we're going to see out of this whole situation.