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"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 u

"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.

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.