Now that everyone’s using Zoom, here are some privacy risks you need to watch out for

Cloud snitching

For paid subscribers, Zoom’s cloud recording feature can either be a life-saver or a catastrophic faux pas waiting to happen. If the feature is enabled on the account, a host can record the meeting along with its text transcription and a text file of any active chats in that meeting, and save it to the cloud where it can later be accessed by other authorized users at your company, including people who may have never attended the meeting in question. Yikes. 

As Mashable’s Zack Morse put it, “What that suggests, but doesn’t clarify, is that for non-webinar/standard meetings, your person-to-person chat messages would be later sent to your boss after a call recorded to the cloud.”

Zoom does allow a narrowing of the audience here, however. Administrators can limit the recording’s accessibility to only certain preapproved IP addresses, even if the recording has already been shared.  

Data gossip

By now, you’re used to hearing it from the privacy-minded: Don’t use Facebook to log into other sites and software unless you want Facebook to have data on what you’re doing. Fair enough. But what to do when Zoom gets caught sending some of your analytics data to Facebook — whether or not you even have a Facebook account? 

An analysis by Vice’s Motherboard last week found the iOS version of the Zoom app doing exactly that. Courtesy of Facebook’s Graph API, Zoom tells Facebook whenever you open the Zoom app, what phone or device you’re using, and your phone carrier, location and a unique advertising identifier. 

Zoom didn’t immediately respond to CNET’s request for comment.

The breezy language in Zoom’s privacy policy about its relationship to third-party data crunchers gives one reason to question where else — and to what extent — that data is being shared or sold that we don’t know about.  

“Zoom does use certain standard advertising tools which require Personal Data (think, for example, Google Ads and Google Analytics). We use these tools to help us improve your advertising experience (such as serving advertisements on our behalf across the Internet, serving personalized ads on our website, and providing analytics services),” the policy says.  “Sharing Personal Data with the third-party provider while using these tools may fall within the extremely broad definition of the ‘sale’ of Personal Data under certain state laws because those companies might use Personal Data for their own business purposes, as well as Zoom’s purposes.”

Here’s a summation of the above corporate jargon: Zoom shares data with enough advertisers and data crunchers, in enough states, that it would broadly qualify as selling your data. 

You should probably review your Zoom and device security settings with an eye toward minimizing permissions, and make sure any antitracking software on your device is up to date and running. 

It may not help, but it can’t hurt.