Zoom — The exceptional rise, and why it now needs a breather…

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Digital Literacy for Decision Makers @ Columbia B-School

5 min readApr 6, 2020

March 10, 2020: I ask my parents back in India if they could download Zoom for a video call. We’ve always used Skype or WhatsApp Video and I don’t know why I asked for Zoom this time. I guess because everyone else was using it.

And just like that, spurred by social distancing and lock-downs due to the coronavirus pandemic, Zoom, a relatively lesser-known video communications software became a household name in a matter of a few months.

Zoom still tops the chart for the highest downloads on the App Store — Zoom tops the chart on the Apple App Store (source: App Store, USA, Apple iOS, retrieved on 04/05/2020)

A bit more about Zoom’s background for those who aren’t aware — Zoom was founded in 2011 and is a cloud platform for video and audio conferencing¹. Zoom Rooms is its software-based conference room solution used in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, etc. As per learnbonds/AppFigures, from February 22 to March 22, downloads of Zoom increased by 1,270%².

Zoom is a publicly-traded company on Nasdaq (ticker: ZM) and headquartered in San Jose, California. And yes, it’s stock has, till recently, witnessed an exceptional rally.

Zoom’s stock was rallying before the office of the New York Attorney General started probing the company’s data privacy and security practices³

How did Zoom become so popular over the likes of Skype, GoToMeeting, and WebEx?

To get an answer to this million-dollar question, I conducted a quick survey among my friends — students, working professionals, and those running their businesses. The most common reason for them using Zoom were — “its easy to use”, “I don’t have to suffer the pain of logging in”, “I don’t have to punch in a number and then say my name”, and “has a clean GUI”.

Zoom’s ease-of-use is clearly its selling point⁴.

The Growing Pains

As Zoom gained popularity amid the coronavirus pandemic, several complaints and concerns about the privacy and security started taking rounds.

As discussed, Zoom’s ease-of-use is what makes it popular. However, it seems that the same features also make it a privacy and security threat for its users.

Just about a day ago, schools in New York have decided to drop Zoom because of security concerns⁵. Several incidents have occurred of the hijacking of online Zoom meetings, now called, Zoombombing. In response to this, Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan apologized in a blog post and declared that his firm will not be adding any new features in the next 90 days and would be focusing on addressing the privacy concerns⁶.

This is not it though. There have also been concerns about user information collection security. Recently, Zoom removed its controversial “attendee attention tracker feature” that allowed the host to track if the user was “paying attention” or not⁶. Zoom also had to update its privacy policy about a week ago to clarify that customer content collected would not be used for advertisement purposes⁷. There were more concerns, some of which have been captured in the timeline below.

A brief timeline of events⁸ ⁹ ¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² ¹³ ¹⁴ ¹⁵ ¹⁶

“‘If we mess up again, it’s done,’ I thought a lot last night”

CEO Eric Yuan confessed to The Wall Street Journal in an interview last Friday, that the security concerns are not letting him sleep at night¹⁷. While, I truly appreciate Mr. Yuan taking the criticism in the right spirit and also taking measures to improve the situation, in my opinion, it is the right time to scale down on our usage of Zoom. The CEO isn’t sure, we aren’t sure, and new problems keep coming up every now and then. Amidst this terrible pandemic that we all are facing, a large-scale security breach is the last thing we would want.

While Zoom is a 9-year old firm, it’s still relatively new, and I would much rather rely on products from firms that are more established and have the required talent base and capital to invest in a proactive approach towards security management.

Give Zoom and its CEO some time to take a breather, reorganize themselves, and come back with a bang.

So, what are the alternatives?

On Friday, Skype reminded the world that it indeed has a Zoom-like functionality that doesn’t require having a Skype account or even the Skype app to get into a meeting.

So there are other options — who would have thought! Here are some of them.

More established (read older and bigger legacy) options to chose from¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹

While there isn’t a perfect solution out there right now, there are many that we can do with. For now, our response and how Zoom deals with the growing security and privacy concerns will decide its fate.

[1] Zoom. (April 5, 2020) https://zoom.us/about

[2] Justinas Baltrusaitis. (April 3, 2020) https://learnbonds.com/news/zoom-downloads-increase-1270-from-employers-working-from-home/

[3] TradingView. (April 5, 2020) https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/OTC-ZOOM/

[4] Dain Evans. (April 4, 2020) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/03/how-zoom-rose-to-the-top-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic.html

[5] Nicole Chavez. (April 4, 2020) https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/04/us/nyc-schools-zoom-online-security/index.html

[6] Eric S. Yuan. (April 1, 2020) https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/

[7] Aparna Bawa. (March 29, 2020) https://zoom.us/privacy?zcid=1231

[8] Zoom. (March 20, 2020) https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/03/20/keep-uninvited-guests-out-of-your-zoom-event/

[9] Allen St. John. (March 20, 2020) https://www.consumerreports.org/video-conferencing-services/zoom-teleconferencing-privacy-concerns/

[10] Eric S. Yuan. (March 27, 2020) https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/03/27/zoom-use-of-facebook-sdk-in-ios-client/

[11] Allen St. John. (March 30, 2020) https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/zoom-tightens-privacy-policy-says-no-user-videos-analyzed-for-ads/

[12] WCVB. (March 30, 2020) https://www.wcvb.com/article/2-massachusetts-schools-report-having-zoom-web-conferences-hijacked/31989185#