As you probably know, schools all around the world are closing due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. But they still need to be educated, so school systems are turning to the commertial video conference platform, Zoom. While schools really have not been good at choosing software, this just seems like a unfathomably horrible choice.

For one, Zoom claimed that they were using End-to-End Encryption, but they lied about that. What else could they be lying about? Well, much more than we can fit here, but let’s explore a few.

They shared user data with facebook without consent. They have such bad security that random people can join their call, which happens often enough that it even got a nickname - zoombombing. Zoom is closed source, so you cannot peek inside and see what they are doing, which opens up Zoom for some major security and privacy concerns. For example, they can use malware to install itself, that can turn on your camera, and it got so bad that Apple had to step in and remove it.

As you can probably see, Zoom is not quite ready to be used by school systems with all these security and privacy concerns. There are so many alturnatives that do not have these issues, like Jitsi Meet, yet they seem incapable on using them.