In the past 3 months alone, Zoom gained 190 million daily users

Thanks to the coronavirus situation around the world, Zoom has now become a household name around the world. In December 2019, the maximum number of daily meeting participants, both free and paid, conducted on Zoom was approximately 10 million. Today, the number has reached 200 million! Yes, Zoon today has more than 200 million daily meeting participants. In addition to general consumers and enterprise users, Zoom is now being used by over 90,000 schools across 20 countries.

Zoom today also highlighted what it have done in the past few weeks to address the privacy issues pointed out by researchers around the world, read about it below.

• On March 20th, we published a blog post to help users address incidents of harassment (or so-called “Zoombombing”) on our platform by clarifying the protective features that can help prevent this, such as waiting rooms, passwords, muting controls, and limiting screen sharing. (We’ve also changed the name and content of that blog post, which originally referred to uninvited participants as “party crashers.” Given the more serious and hateful types of attacks that have since emerged, that terminology clearly doesn’t suffice. We absolutely condemn these types of attacks and deeply feel for anyone whose meeting has been interrupted in this way.)  
• On March 27th, we took action to remove the Facebook SDK in our iOS client and have reconfigured it to prevent it from collecting unnecessary device information from our users.
• On March 29th, we updated our privacy policy to be more clear and transparent around what data we collect and how it is used – explicitly clarifying that we do not sell our users’ data, we have never sold user data in the past, and have no intention of selling users’ data going forward.
• For education users we:
  • Rolled out a guide for administrators on setting up a virtual classroom.
  • Set up a guide on how to better secure their virtual classrooms.
  • Set up a dedicated K-12 privacy policy.
  • Changed the settings for education users enrolled in our K-12 program so virtual waiting rooms are on by default.
  • Changed the settings for education users enrolled in our K-12 program so that teachers by default are the only ones who can share content in class.
• On April 1, we:
  • Published a blog to clarify the facts around encryption on our platform – acknowledging and apologizing for the confusion.
  • Removed the attendee attention tracker feature.
  • Released fixes for both Mac-related issues raised by Patrick Weadle.
  • Released a fix for the UNC link issue.
  • Removed the LinkedIn Sales Navigator after identifying unnecessary data disclosure by the feature.

Over the next 90 days, Zoom will be using all its resources to better identify, address, and fix security and privacy issues proactively. So, Zoom won’t be adding any new features in the next 3 months. It will also conduct a comprehensive review with third-party experts and representative users to understand and ensure the security of its service.

On a related note, Microsoft has seen daily active users increase by 70% compared to the same month last year, with 40 million daily active users. This has meant a 220% increase in Skype to Skype calling minutes month over month.

Source: Zoom