Zoom feature secretly displayed LinkedIn data
For Americans sheltering at home during the coronavirus pandemic, the Zoom videoconferencing platform has become a lifeline, enabling millions of people to easily stay in touch.
But what many may not know is that, until last week, a data-mining feature on Zoom allowed some participants to surreptitiously access LinkedIn profile data about other users — without Zoom asking for their permission during the meeting or even notifying them that someone was snooping on them.
The undisclosed data mining adds to growing concerns about Zoom’s business practices at a moment when many are embracing the platform.
An analysis by The New York Times found that when people signed in to a meeting, Zoom’s software automatically sent their names and email addresses to a company system it used to match them with their LinkedIn profiles.
The data-mining feature was available to Zoom users who subscribed to a LinkedIn service for sales prospecting, called LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Once a Zoom user enabled the feature, they could quickly and covertly access LinkedIn profile data — like locations, employer names and job titles — for people in their Zoom meetings by clicking on a LinkedIn icon next to their names.
The system did not simply automate the manual process of one user looking up the name of another participant on LinkedIn during a Zoom meeting. In tests conducted last week, The Times found that even when a reporter signed in to a Zoom meeting under pseudonyms — “Anonymous” and “I am not here” — the data-mining tool was able to instantly match him to his LinkedIn profile. In doing so, Zoom disclosed the reporter’s real name to another user, overriding his efforts to keep it private.
Reporters also found that Zoom automatically sent participants’ personal information to its datamining tool even when no one in a meeting had activated it. This week, for instance, as high school students i n Colorado signed in to a mandatory video meeting for a class, Zoom readied the full names and email addresses of at least six students — and their teacher — for possible use by its LinkedIn profile-matching tool, according to a Times analysis of the data traffic that Zoom sent to a student’s account.
The discoveries about Zoom’s data-mining feature echo what users have learned about the surveillance practices of other popular tech platforms over the last few years. The video-meeting platform that has offered a welcome window on American resiliency during the coronavirus — providing a virtual peek into colleagues’ living rooms, classmates’ kitchens and friends’ birthday celebrations — can reveal more about its users than they may realize.
After reporters contacted Zoom and LinkedIn with their findings on the profile-matching feature, the companies said they would disable the service.
In a statement, Zoom said it took users’ privacy “extremely seriously.”