Zoom CEO acknowledges security ‘missteps’, says impact of calls routed through China was ‘minor’
- ‘What I can promise you is that we take these issues very, very seriously,’ Zoom CEO Eric Yuan says
- The video conferencing app has seen a surge of users staying home due to the coronavirus pandemic, but also a backlash over security and privacy issues
The CEO of Zoom Video Technologies acknowledged in a live-streamed broadcast on Wednesday that the company had made “missteps” in handling a surge of new users staying home during the coronavirus pandemic, leading to problems such as routing of traffic through China and “Zoombombing”, when uninvited guests crash meetings.
Zoom’s popular video conferencing app was built primarily for enterprise and business customers, but people have been using it in unexpected ways in the past few weeks including live-streamed classes, virtual happy hours and even online weddings, Zoom founder and chief executive Eric Yuan said in the live broadcast on YouTube.
“Clearly we have a lot of work to do to ensure the security of all these new consumer use cases,” Yuan said. “But what I can promise you is that we take these issues very, very seriously. We’re looking into each and every one of them. If we find an issue, we’ll acknowledge it and we’ll fix it.”
Nonetheless, the Chinese-born American CEO maintained that the app is safe to use: “I can tell you – Zoom is absolutely safe compared to our peers,” he said. “We have never sold user data in the past and we have no intention to do it.”