![]() ![]() The lesson is one we need to learn and relearn. But despite glowing customer reviews, Ring became mired in privacy scandals, including one that involved hackers hijacking the Ring cameras of multiple families. Ring, which is owned by Amazon, became popular during another crummy situation: an increase in the petty crime of package thefts. We went through this not long ago with Ring, the doorbell camera, another product with a catchy name. That’s because we find ourselves dealing with the same situation over and over again, focusing on the convenience of easy-to-use tech products over issues like data security and privacy. If there is something déjà vu about all of this, you aren’t wrong. The company promised to focus on fixing its privacy and security issues over the coming months it reiterated the plan on Wednesday. In a blog post last week, Zoom’s chief executive, Eric Yuan, apologized for all the mistakes and said the recent problems had largely been addressed. The issues with basic security practices culminated with “ Zoombombing,” in which trolls crashed people’s video meetings and bombarded them with inappropriate material like pornography. The missteps included a weakness that would have allowed malware to attach to Zoom and hijack our web cameras. Zoom has had multiple privacy snafus in that period, which have come up so frequently that they became a game of Whac-a-Mole. For lots of us, it’s a lifeline to see and converse with a friend or relative.īut for the last year, I’ve been wary of the app. Many of us use it for free, though Zoom also has a paid product. Then, voilà, you are looking at a screen with familiar faces and can begin chatting away.Īt least 200 million of us, desperate to see people outside our homes, now use Zoom, up from 10 million a few months ago. The company designed its app to be free and extremely easy to use in tech lingo, we call it “frictionless.” Even our friends and relatives with zero technical know-how can join a Zoom meeting just by clicking a link. Let me first say I understand why Zoom has been so popular in the pandemic. It’s because I have a fundamental problem with Zoom. I’ve been a no-show, and it’s not just because my hair has grown embarrassingly long. Virtual happy hours, work meetings, dinners, you name it. Apps run stuff in the background and I won’t even get into the stupid stuff they waste CPU time on when you’re never even using them 99.9% of the time.Ever since many of us started working from home in the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve been invited to countless gatherings taking place on Zoom, the videoconferencing app. Use the browser version of the meeting client. ProTip: Just uninstall all meeting apps from your computer. Jonathan Leitschuh’s original disclosure provides more information about the problem.īrowser-based video conferencing apps may be a better solution in the future-if you’re just using an application in a browser with no software installation, it can’t do shady things like this to your Mac or PC. If you’d like to keep Zoom installed, Lifehacker‘s quick guide points out you should enable the “Turn off my video when joining a meeting” option for safety. If you haven’t, a Zoom update will likely re-enable the web server. These assume that you’ve uninstalled the Zoom app from your Applications folder first. If you do see Zoom’s web server running and you want to remove Zoom completely from your system, run the following commands. ![]()
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