Are You on Zoom Right Now?
Staying home without privacy.
--
When you think about Zoom meetings and privacy issues, the first thing that comes to mind is the “bombing” incidents reported earlier this year when the app quickly became the pandemic’s most popular virtual conference platform. They consisted of unwanted guests breaking into online meeting rooms and bringing an array of unwelcome behaviors, from yelling racial slurs to sharing screens with pornographic content. But, what if that is not the main privacy issue causing you to worry?
What if, in spite of your precautions such as securing your meeting rooms with passwords, you feel uneasy before clicking “join meeting now” due to a different privacy concern? What if what bothers you is the fact that you are not joining a virtual room any more than you are opening the door to a space that used to be completely yours? A place you used to share only with selected guests who earned your friendship?
Since your job or business, as well as your children’s school, moved into your living room, your place for winding down and taking your mind off your professional and academic to-do lists has become an extension of what are possibly your least favorite activities - the ones which made you check your watch constantly as the day approached its end. Work, school, home, have all blended into one space, and there is nowhere to run if you want to truly disconnect.
The day starts, you put on a nice top, you comb your hair, and make sure your lipstick and face powder are working well with the light of the room (something better checked from the Zoom camera itself) before opening your laptop to see the familiar faces of people you used to see in person every day. Then, with one tap on the keyboard, you are no longer privy of your place, which is exposed and potentially subject to curiosity, judging, and even a little bit of creepiness. You may want to hide it with an ugly virtual background — or maybe a nice looking one, still artificial — that makes you look like you are talking from a printed aluminum foil balloon. The truth is, no matter how much you work on picking just the perfect Zoom background, it still gives the vibe that you are wearing crocs to a formal event — it is weird, if not necessarily inappropriate.
But what is worse than using a bad cover is, you may not be in total control of what inadvertently happens around you, such as your toddler crawling onto a kitchen counter, a pet jumping off a shelf, a spouse coming out of the shower not completely covered — all potentially happening when your eyes are on your laptop. In that case, it is not unfair to say, your kid, your cat, your husband, becomes the accidental Zoom bomber. You may take your preventive measures, but these scenarios are very possible for the most cautious human being.
In the 2016 movie “Whisky Tango Foxtrot,” Tina Fey’s character Skypes her boyfriend, played by Josh Charles, and spots a woman on his bed thanks to a door mirror opposite to his webcam. Charles’s character’s intention was easy to grasp: as long as the hook-up didn’t make a sound, he could chat with his unsuspicious girlfriend for a few minutes. But when the hot lady gets up, despite walking quietly behind him, Tina’s character’s heart is stabbed by the exposure of a boyfriend’s cheating and inattention. It turns out, a small webcam may share more than you would like.
What about a household like mine? We have four desks in the living room and at times we are all logged into meetings at the same time. My own work as a content producer means I have at least three devices I work from and my calendar is filled with one-click access to meetings throughout the day. My children, ages nine and five, have their own online school, attending live classes for several hours daily, in the presence of a teacher, and a classroom of about twenty children each. And at times, my husband also works from home with his laptop, where he talks to clients and business partners, many times on a virtual meeting platform like Zoom. That means, we have the potential to be logged into eight combined online meetings at once, if needed.
That would be an exaggeration, though — for the most part, no one is attending two meetings at once. Although it is possible to be logged twice into the same meeting for purposes like easier screen sharing, for example. The potential to expose our personal lives is great. And with that comes the question: is this the ever predicted end of privacy? Moreover, should we find new ways of protecting it or should we just accept its inevitable end? One thing is for sure: thanks to virtual work and distance learning, staying home does not mean being shielded from curious eyes any longer.
