This April 18, 2019, photo shows a sign for Zoom Video Communications ahead of their Nasdaq IPO in New York. **FILE**Zoom is facing fresh allegations that its video conferencing platform is used to spy on people and invade their privacy, including by the Chinese government, hackers, and the company’s workers training artificial intelligence tools.
“The dramatic increase in the number of Zoom users in the early months of the pandemic coincided with increasingly stringent controls over the company’s internal workings and with demands from Chinese security agencies to immediately block any activities on the teleconferencing platform, anywhere in the world, that authorities deemed illegal,” Ms. Allen-Ebrahimian wrote.
Concerns about espionage on Zoom are not limited to China, however. Three U.K.-based researchers said this month that they discovered a successful way to use Zoom to spy on what people are typing on their computers. “The ubiquity of keyboard acoustic emanations makes them not only a readily available attack vector, but also prompts victims to underestimate their output,” the researchers wrote. “For example, when typing a password, people will regularly hide their screen but will do little to obfuscate their keyboard’s sound.”