A Feature on Zoom Secretly Displayed Data From People’s LinkedIn Profiles

Early Thursday morning, after Times reporters contacted Zoom and LinkedIn with their findings on the profile-matching feature, the companies said they would disable the service.

In a statement, Zoom said it took users’ privacy “extremely seriously” and was “removing the LinkedIn Sales Navigator to disable the feature on our platform entirely.” In a related blog post, Eric S. Yuan, the chief executive of Zoom, wrote that the company had removed the data-mining feature “after identifying unnecessary data disclosure.” He also said that Zoom would freeze all new features for the next 90 days to concentrate on data security and privacy issues.

In a separate statement, LinkedIn said it worked “to make it easy for members to understand their choices over what information they share” and would suspend the profile-matching feature on Zoom “while we investigate this further.”

The Times’s findings add to an avalanche of reports about privacy and security issues with Zoom, which has quickly emerged as the go-to business and social platform during the pandemic. Zoom’s cloud-meetings service is currently the top free app in the Apple App Store in 64 countries including the United States, France and Russia, according to Sensor Tower, a mobile app research firm.

As the videoconferencing service’s popularity has surged, however, the company has scrambled to handle software design choices and security flaws that have made users vulnerable to harassment and privacy invasions.

On Monday, for instance, the Boston office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a warning saying that it had received multiple reports from Massachusetts schools about trolls hijacking Zoom meetings with displays of pornography, white supremacist imagery and threatening language — malicious attacks known as “zoombombing.”

Privacy experts said the company seemed to value ease of use and fast growth over instituting default user protections.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/technology/zoom-linkedin-data.html