Meeting platform zooms to prominence but issues arise

AUCKLAND: Who would have thought when we departed for our Christmas holidays that a quarter of the way through 2020 we’d be Zooming five or six times a day?

That’s the new reality for many of us, though we could just have easily been Skyping instead. Microsoft’s missteps since buying the world’s most popular voice and video calling app in 2011 for $US8.5 billion ($NZ14 billion) opened the door for Zoom to become a household name.

Nasdaqlisted Zoom’s share price is up around 65% for the year. In an update to customers on April 1, Zoom billionaire cofounder Eric Yuan revealed that during March, Zoom hosted more than 200 million free and paid meeting participants, up from about 10 million at the end of December.

That is the sort of exponential growth Covid19 modellers dread but which tech startups and their investors love. Zoom is not a revolutionary product but is perceived to offer more reliable video and audio quality than Skype and is certainly more straightforward to use.

The cloudbased service is very easy to set up and join and record multiparty video calls including with people outside your organisation.

But that ease of use has also revealed weaknesses in the platform when it comes to privacy and security.

The simplest but most troubling weakness allows ‘‘Zoombombing’’, where pranksters, and those with more malicious intent, gatecrash video meetings simply by guessing the meeting web link that is sent to all participants.

The Zoombombing issue is easily fixed by adding passwords to invitations to meetings or enabling the waiting room feature that requires a meeting host to approve each attendee.

But other security issues, including software bugs and confusion over whether Zoom meeting content is encrypted (it is only if every participant is using the Zoom app rather than dialling in from a regular phone line), have hurt the company and stalled its market rally. — BusinessDesk