Zoom to now terminate meetings as soon as screenshot is taken
In a bid to slash the worldwide overdose traffic on its servers, video conferencing giant Zoom has announced that its latest version will be terminating meetings as soon as a screenshot is taken.
“Ever since the coronavirus pandemic began, we found that many people across the globe are using Zoom to hold meetings for no reason, but to simply take screenshots and post them on social media. This is a colossal waste of Zoom’s resources — so in the latest version, we now have a detector enabled, that will get triggered as soon as a screenshot is taken and will immediately terminate the meeting,” Zoom CEO Eric Yuan told The UnReal Times in-house technology expert Kill Dates.
Yuan credited the Indian government’s IRCTC utility as his inspiration, citing the corporation’s measures to slash traffic during Tatkal booking periods. “They’re true visionaries — the methods they’ve deployed to filter traffic, right from repeated prompting of captchas, to delayed OTPs are amazing. That’s what got me thinking that we should add such tactics to Zoom as well. And terminating the meetings of those who merely want screenshots was the best place to start,” Yuan added.
“This has already freed up Zoom’s resources up to 50%, for more useful and real meetings. But all isn’t lost for those who want to do time-pass with Zoom — we also have a single-click direct-to-Instagram screenshot feature coming up. Our algorithm for that will use AI to figure out the best filters and captions and will automatically post the screenshot to the taker’s Instagram feed and stories,” the Zoom founder expressed. To make things further foolproof, the CEO also announced that the app would monitor the device’s cameras too, and would terminate upon detection of any camera lens.
Yuan went on to express his interest to personally fund anyone who designs a Fake Zoom app. “We’ve various websites and apps available to simulate fake Facebook conversations, fake WhatsApp chats, fake tweets and so on. If we’ve one such thing for fake Zoom conferences too, I would be the first to fund it — the entire ‘screenshots’ category of Zoom users can patronise that instead and make life easier for us,” he signed off.
