8 ms·

Just a reminder that it's probably not a wise idea for anyone to get further in bed with Zoom than they already are. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/

by bww 6y ago

Just a reminder that it's probably not a wise idea for anyone to get further in bed with Zoom than they already are. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/18/zoom-helped-china-surveillance/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/18/zoom-he...

_6fmb 6y ago
What an overwrought headline, the employee in question has already been fired.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  The optics are still very, very bad for Zoom. I have zero trust in them.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    There are remarkably few organisations I somewhat trust (even then on a sliding scale) but on that spectrum Zoom sits at the "wouldn't touch them with someone elses bargepole" end.
- criley2 6y ago
  It's weird that you describe the headline as "overwrought" and call the person an "employee" when the headline is more accurate than you. This was an executive, not just an employee. That's a huge distinction and I can't help but think you intentionally downgraded his position to cover-up his behavior. "Just an employee" "Not a big deal" But when you read the allegations, they seem like a very big deal that an executive was spying on users, giving their information to the Chinese government explicitly for oppressive purposes, including folks who are not in China, and went out of his way to personally censor non-Chinese groups meeting to discuss the Massacre-Which-Cannot-Be-Mentioned. I would say the headline understates the gravity (it's very much a 'by-the-books' headline that you KNOW went through ten levels of Legal), and that your hand waving here feels much more dishonest than the headline.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Not only that, but this line stuck out to me. > and other employees have been placed on administrative leave until the investigation is complete. Zoom at least suspects he did not act alone.
  - btown 6y ago
    Regardless of intent, it's undeniable that at some point there were insufficient controls to prevent this executive, or any executive in the future, from gaining this level of surveillance access. And it's also undeniable that the consequences for Zoom (really, just needing to fire a few people, and not even the people who designed those controls if there were any) are so minimal that they have no incentive to strengthen those controls. For some organizations (mine included) the benefits of Zoom outweigh the risks of Zoom having proven itself to not have those controls, namely the possibility of both political and corporate espionage. As with all things, YMMV.
  - _6fmb 6y ago
    It was an executive purposefully brought in for legal compliance with that country's requirements. That he was fired is a huge signal in how seriously aggressive zoom is about protecting data that they would even be willing to go up against national governments. I feel like the firing is a huge part of the story.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  The company in question is still operating. We don't know if the employee was just a scapegoat.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- kemonocode 6y ago
  Sorry, but an executive is not just "an employee" and any alarms are rightfully justified. Took a little bit of cajoling in my company but we've successfully moved to self-hosted tools for the most part (Jitsi and Rocket.chat) with just a couple of projects with outside contractors using Slack.
tehjoker 6y ago
Imagine if they did that for the US government, which is easier to compel since they are in US territory.
- xibalba 6y ago
  One nation is currently operating concentration camps and arrests and seizes the property of prominent citizens who criticize the government. Are you sure that's an equivalence you want to draw.
  - jethro_tell 6y ago
    yes, I remember when I got my trump kidney from a poor anti-fascist liberal. /s America is fucked up, that doesn't mean that other countries aren't also fucked up or aren't doing worse things with the data they collect.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      Yea, but you live here and so you should think about the implications of this for yourself and your countrymen and not through the lens of international competition. That is a distraction. Essentially, the China case proved Zoom is willing to cooperate with a nation state. The US is the nation state we live in, Zoom is HQ'd here. Therefore, the risk to us is high. As an aside, the organ harvesting idea comes from the Fulan Gong, who are similar to Chinese Scientologists. It is not clear to me that their claims are accurate.
  - fhrifjr 6y ago
    Like Guantanamo Bay or prosecution of Assange for his journalistic work to expose wrongdoing of government? Or maybe you’re talking about for-profit prison system and mass incarceration practices? But you’re probably talking about China, right?
    - bananabreakfast 6y ago
      Once again, that is a false equivalence. No one imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay is a US Citizen and neither is Assange. The US prison system is super fucked up but it is not the same as ethnic cleansing. You are comparing apples to concentration camps.
Frost1x 6y ago
"Business takes the easy and ethically questionable route to continue making money" news at 11. I'm not condoning Zoom's actions but this is hardly a problem unique to Zoom. Few if any businesses will stand up for consumers and citizens unless it's directly aligned with their profit motive. In this case, the business choice is to operate or not in mainland China. If they choose to stand up against the Chinese government they're going to have difficulty continuing to operate in China and risk losing that entire market. Google played this PR game many years ago in China (rejecting some of the governmental policies) and ultimately caved to Chinese policies to do business there. Businesses are not the organizations we should look to for empowering people, that's simply not their goal no matter how much their marketing team may want to sell that idea by following trending (popular) social movements that they've already done market studies on to assess potential fallback.
- tw04 6y ago
  I think it's a pretty bold claim to state that Zoom's actions aren't unique. What other business in this space has given China unfettered access to US users and data? I'm not aware of it occurring with Webex, Teams or go2meeting. The "one rogue employee" thing falls flat pretty quickly when they're the only ones that had this issue. This feels like their encryption thing all over again, there's an "oversight" that is equivalent to a backdoor that only gets fixed when they get caught.
  - Frost1x 6y ago
    I didn't realize they shared any user data outside China (misread the WP portion). It appears they did share 10 users' data which is a bit questionable but I'd hardly call that unfettered access to US data. The fact is all of the US businesses operating in China give surveillance ability to the Chinese government for the Chinese users and are operating in an ethically questionable space being primarily based outside of China, at least in my opinion. It's really not too different than the businesses sharing US citizen data to the US government, much of which Snowden and others before him exposed. I suspect there's a lot more surveillance going on everywhere than the general public know about and the businesses best positioned to do the surveillance are probably doing it.
Havoc 6y ago
And yet a surprising number of firms with sensitive info continue to use it. Law firms etc
- dylan604 6y ago
  Is this an attempt to refute the claim using Zoom is bad, or an indictment against those still using it?
  - xevrem 6y ago
    an indictment that so many people who should know better, still use a tainted and non-benign product.
    - yabuttslivnwds 6y ago
      Elaine Chao’s sister is married to Xi, while Elaine, as transportation secretary under Trump, was busted inviting family with business ties to the CCP to official US government meetings. The fear on this forum is imagined political thriller more than realistic. Every technologist is grifting off the military industrial complex.
- schoolornot 6y ago
  The lesser of two evils and the product just works. They might have a few governance issues they need to fix. But at the end of the day, they signed a BAA with us and will take the liability and fallout of a breach.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by bww 6y ago

_6fmb 6y ago

What an overwrought headline, the employee in question has already been fired.

fermienrico 6y ago
The optics are still very, very bad for Zoom. I have zero trust in them.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  There are remarkably few organisations I somewhat trust (even then on a sliding scale) but on that spectrum Zoom sits at the "wouldn't touch them with someone elses bargepole" end.
criley2 6y ago
It's weird that you describe the headline as "overwrought" and call the person an "employee" when the headline is more accurate than you. This was an executive, not just an employee. That's a huge distinction and I can't help but think you intentionally downgraded his position to cover-up his behavior. "Just an employee" "Not a big deal" But when you read the allegations, they seem like a very big deal that an executive was spying on users, giving their information to the Chinese government explicitly for oppressive purposes, including folks who are not in China, and went out of his way to personally censor non-Chinese groups meeting to discuss the Massacre-Which-Cannot-Be-Mentioned. I would say the headline understates the gravity (it's very much a 'by-the-books' headline that you KNOW went through ten levels of Legal), and that your hand waving here feels much more dishonest than the headline.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Not only that, but this line stuck out to me. > and other employees have been placed on administrative leave until the investigation is complete. Zoom at least suspects he did not act alone.
- btown 6y ago
  Regardless of intent, it's undeniable that at some point there were insufficient controls to prevent this executive, or any executive in the future, from gaining this level of surveillance access. And it's also undeniable that the consequences for Zoom (really, just needing to fire a few people, and not even the people who designed those controls if there were any) are so minimal that they have no incentive to strengthen those controls. For some organizations (mine included) the benefits of Zoom outweigh the risks of Zoom having proven itself to not have those controls, namely the possibility of both political and corporate espionage. As with all things, YMMV.
- _6fmb 6y ago
  It was an executive purposefully brought in for legal compliance with that country's requirements. That he was fired is a huge signal in how seriously aggressive zoom is about protecting data that they would even be willing to go up against national governments. I feel like the firing is a huge part of the story.
alisonkisk 6y ago
The company in question is still operating. We don't know if the employee was just a scapegoat.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
kemonocode 6y ago
Sorry, but an executive is not just "an employee" and any alarms are rightfully justified. Took a little bit of cajoling in my company but we've successfully moved to self-hosted tools for the most part (Jitsi and Rocket.chat) with just a couple of projects with outside contractors using Slack.

tehjoker 6y ago

Imagine if they did that for the US government, which is easier to compel since they are in US territory.

xibalba 6y ago
One nation is currently operating concentration camps and arrests and seizes the property of prominent citizens who criticize the government. Are you sure that's an equivalence you want to draw.
- jethro_tell 6y ago
  yes, I remember when I got my trump kidney from a poor anti-fascist liberal. /s America is fucked up, that doesn't mean that other countries aren't also fucked up or aren't doing worse things with the data they collect.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    Yea, but you live here and so you should think about the implications of this for yourself and your countrymen and not through the lens of international competition. That is a distraction. Essentially, the China case proved Zoom is willing to cooperate with a nation state. The US is the nation state we live in, Zoom is HQ'd here. Therefore, the risk to us is high. As an aside, the organ harvesting idea comes from the Fulan Gong, who are similar to Chinese Scientologists. It is not clear to me that their claims are accurate.
- fhrifjr 6y ago
  Like Guantanamo Bay or prosecution of Assange for his journalistic work to expose wrongdoing of government? Or maybe you’re talking about for-profit prison system and mass incarceration practices? But you’re probably talking about China, right?
  - bananabreakfast 6y ago
    Once again, that is a false equivalence. No one imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay is a US Citizen and neither is Assange. The US prison system is super fucked up but it is not the same as ethnic cleansing. You are comparing apples to concentration camps.

Frost1x 6y ago

"Business takes the easy and ethically questionable route to continue making money" news at 11. I'm not condoning Zoom's actions but this is hardly a problem unique to Zoom. Few if any businesses will stand up for consumers and citizens unless it's directly aligned with their profit motive. In this case, the business choice is to operate or not in mainland China. If they choose to stand up against the Chinese government they're going to have difficulty continuing to operate in China and risk losing that entire market. Google played this PR game many years ago in China (rejecting some of the governmental policies) and ultimately caved to Chinese policies to do business there. Businesses are not the organizations we should look to for empowering people, that's simply not their goal no matter how much their marketing team may want to sell that idea by following trending (popular) social movements that they've already done market studies on to assess potential fallback.

tw04 6y ago
I think it's a pretty bold claim to state that Zoom's actions aren't unique. What other business in this space has given China unfettered access to US users and data? I'm not aware of it occurring with Webex, Teams or go2meeting. The "one rogue employee" thing falls flat pretty quickly when they're the only ones that had this issue. This feels like their encryption thing all over again, there's an "oversight" that is equivalent to a backdoor that only gets fixed when they get caught.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  I didn't realize they shared any user data outside China (misread the WP portion). It appears they did share 10 users' data which is a bit questionable but I'd hardly call that unfettered access to US data. The fact is all of the US businesses operating in China give surveillance ability to the Chinese government for the Chinese users and are operating in an ethically questionable space being primarily based outside of China, at least in my opinion. It's really not too different than the businesses sharing US citizen data to the US government, much of which Snowden and others before him exposed. I suspect there's a lot more surveillance going on everywhere than the general public know about and the businesses best positioned to do the surveillance are probably doing it.

Havoc 6y ago

And yet a surprising number of firms with sensitive info continue to use it. Law firms etc

dylan604 6y ago
Is this an attempt to refute the claim using Zoom is bad, or an indictment against those still using it?
- xevrem 6y ago
  an indictment that so many people who should know better, still use a tainted and non-benign product.
  - yabuttslivnwds 6y ago
    Elaine Chao’s sister is married to Xi, while Elaine, as transportation secretary under Trump, was busted inviting family with business ties to the CCP to official US government meetings. The fear on this forum is imagined political thriller more than realistic. Every technologist is grifting off the military industrial complex.
schoolornot 6y ago
The lesser of two evils and the product just works. They might have a few governance issues they need to fix. But at the end of the day, they signed a BAA with us and will take the liability and fallout of a breach.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]