Don’t Post Happy Hour on Your Company’s Zoom Account
After a long day of awkward virtual meetings and scrolling through increasingly apocalyptic headlines, chatting with friends on the Zoom phone may be the closest you get to an entire week. But using your company account to bypass the 40-minute free calling limit is a pretty bad idea – just not for the reasons you might think.
Like any web application that runs ads, Zoom shares some user data with third-party applications for advertising purposes , although they do not technically “sell” it. Zoom’s real privacy issue lies not with third-party applications, or even the software itself, but who has administrator rights in any organization. Their powers are too great to be trusted.
You might already know about some of Zoom’s silly privacy quirks, like how easy it is for assholes to disrupt public meetings ( very, very simple ) and how private side chats really are ( not at all ). The Electronic Frontier Foundation , a not-for-profit digital privacy organization, is also seriously concerned about the amount of information Zoom administrators can obtain about meeting attendees. According to the EFF’s Guide to Remote Conferencing Tools , all of the following are available through reporting tools and / or the Zoom dashboard :
- Operating system, IP address, and location of each device used, including the make and model of any external cameras or microphones.
- Real-time usage data for all users across all calls: who is using the software, where they are using it, and for how long
- Full content of all recorded calls, including chat logs, transcripts and other analytical information
Keep in mind that administrators can generate reports for all participants in a call – even for accounts that are not associated with the receiving organization.
Some of the creepier administration tools – such as the setting that keeps track of whether attendees are actually looking at the meeting window , or the one that allows hosts to identify guest accounts – are disabled by default, but easy to enable. In terms of group chat outside office hours, the situation gets even worse: Owners (and some administrators, depending on their privileges) can log into any meeting in their account at any time without the prior consent of other participants. Yes, whoever manages your company’s Zoom instance can interrupt your happy hour if they choose. They almost certainly have better things to do than spy on friends of coworkers or make unannounced calls, but that doesn’t change the fact that they can do it.
The question is not whether Zoom collects information that your friends may choose not to share with your employer – it definitely does – but whether you trust your company’s Zoom administrators to keep them from digging into it. If not, create an account with your personal email address and take calls yourself. Group chats are limited to 40 minutes on the Free Tier, but you can simply restart them. If it’s too hassle, splitting the $ 15 monthly subscription fee with group chat might be worth it, at least for now. And, of course, keep in mind that Zoom is far from the only option for communicating during quarantine. There are other apps that work just as well to keep your boss from ruining the party.