Zoom recruits former Facebook security chief to improve privacy measures

Zoom has hired a former Facebook security chief as an advisor to the company to improve its privacy and security measures.

The security chief, Alex Stamos, will be a part of the company’s new advisory board, which includes executives from Netflix and Uber. This comes after the video-conferencing app has faced significant backlash from users around the world.

In late March, Stamos tweeted a series of messages calling on the company to be more transparent and roll out a new 30-day security plan. Following the tweets, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan contacted Stamos and asked him to help the company to enhance its security and privacy practices.

“Zoom has some important work to do in core application security, cryptographic design and infrastructure security, and I’m looking forward to working with Zoom’s engineering teams on those projects,” Stamos wrote in a blog post.

As Zoom’s popularity has skyrocketed, its privacy flaws have been uncovered by several security researchers. The company has faced significant backlash from users concerned about the lack of end-to-end encryption, which has allowed for ‘Zoomboming,’ as unauthorized people have been able to access Zoom meetings and share hate-speech or pornographic images.

Further, one of Zoom’s shareholders recently launched a class-action lawsuit against the company for failing to disclose its security flaws.

Although Zoom has promised that it is going to implement new privacy features, it’ll likely take months for them to roll out to users.

Source: Reuters