Former Facebook Executive Commissioned To Fix Zoom Privacy Issues

Zoom continues to gain popularity with plenty of people stuck at home. Despite warnings of potentially placing their data at risk, folks have continued to use the video conferencing app. Thus Zoombombings continue but improving the security and privacy issues could be fixed soon.

It appears Zoom has asked help from a former chief security officer, Alex Stamos. In a post he made on Medium, Stamos narrated how he was called up by Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan when he saw some tweets by the former Facebook executive. Some of the tweets were about the issues that the video-conferencing app was facing. After some back-and-forth chatter, Stamos was offered a consultancy position to help address security and privacy issues. He readily agreed.

Stamos left Facebook two years ago and is currently the director of Stanford University’s Internet Observatory. Stamos is pretty passionate about user privacy and similar issues, making him the perfect guy to help out Zoom with its woes.

“He asked if I would be interested in helping Zoom build up its security, privacy and safety capabilities as an outside consultant, and I readily agreed,” Stamos said in the Medium post.

The invite to help out in improving the security measures of Zoom appealed to Stamos was made even more tempting because the app had no appreciable downtime for a couple of weeks now. From that alone, he has seen some vast improvements made for the app, especially with the surge of users caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.

“This is possibly the most impactful challenge faced by the tech industry in the age of COVID-19, and together we can make something positive out of these difficult times and ensure that communications are safer and more secure for all,” Stamos said.

It was not mentioned when the security issues would finally be addressed. Stamos is likely trying to figure that out now and may have to do something. Restless people are not the only ones trying to find something to keep themselves busy. Hackers and intruders are likely to feast on the glitch - some of which may have likely been already done.

Until these flaws are addressed, most are advised to be more alert when using the Zoom video conferencing app. There are other programs most can use but Zoom seems to be the top choice nowadays - yet another reason that should appeal to Stamos.