Zoom boss says it'll freeze feature updates to address security issues
CEO Eric Yuan reveals its daily users jumped from 10 million in December to 200 million in March.
Zoom will pour its efforts into addressing its security issues over the next 90 days, its CEO promised.
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan responded to increasing security concerns over his company's videoconferencing app Wednesday, by outlining his plan to address them in the next 90 days. He also revealed that daily meeting participants ballooned from 10 million in December to 200 million in March as the coronavirus outbreak forced people to work from home.
Over that time, Zoom moved from being an app mostly used for company meetings to a mainstream consumer one.
"For the past several weeks, supporting this influx of users has been a tremendous undertaking and our sole focus," Yuan wrote in a blog post. "However, we recognize that we have fallen short of the community's -- and our own -- privacy and security expectations."
Zoom will enact a 90-day feature freeze, meaning it'll stop adding new features, so it can address those privacy issues. It'll also "a comprehensive review with third-party experts" to make sure it's handling the security of its consumer users appropriately, along with releasing a transparency report outlining requests for user data from law enforcement and governments.
Yuan will also start holding a weekly webinar on Wednesdays at 10 a.m. PT to discuss its privacy and security updates.
The video meeting app's security has come into focus in recent days, from its tattle-tale attention-tracking feature to uninvited attendees "Zoombombing" meetings. New York Attorney General Letitia James sent a letter demanding action from the company on Monday, while security researchers on Wednesday discovered bugs that might let hackers seize control of webcams and microphones on Zoom users' Macs.
Elon Musk's SpaceX reportedly banned employees from using Zoom altogether, as has NASA.
Last week, Zoom removed the Facebook SDK from its iPhone app after a report that it was sending data to the social network, even for people without a Facebook account.