Zoom sends data to China

"In an emergency effort to help world users connect with each other during a pandemic, we have deployed a new server in China," said Yuan. "However, we have failed to divide the boundaries clearly, leaving certain meetings connected to systems in China."

Mr. Yuan did not mention the number of specific users affected. According to the information on the Zoom homepage, when there is heavy traffic, this online meeting application will transfer traffic to the nearest data center with the largest available capacity.

However, Zoom's data centers in China will not be used to route users' video calls if they are not in the country. This concerns privacy: China does not enforce strict data protection laws, and may even ask Zoom to decode the content of encrypted calls.

Earlier, researchers at the University of Toronto (Canada) also found that Zoom's encryption keys were issued via a server in China , even when the participants were outside the country. .

"When we checked video calls through Zoom with two people in the US and one in Canada, we found the AES-128 key to encrypt and decode video content sent to one of the servers that seemed to be located in Beijing, IP address 52.81.151.250 ", the team representative said.

According to statistics, Zoom has about 700 employees in China.

Zoom is an online meeting software that has received great attention since early 2020 due to Covid-19 outbreak. However, the app is being criticized for a range of privacy issues, such as sending unauthorized user data to Facebook, advertising false end-to-end encryption and allowing virtual meeting room owners to track people. attend.

Mr. Yuan also acknowledged not fully evaluating the security and privacy of his online meeting application. He apologized for the incidents, saying the company did not design software with a vision that would be well received today, and promised to fix everything to regain trust from users.

Micah Soto

Update 07 April 2020