02 April 20, 18:35
Quote:Zoom has nixed a feature that came under fire for “undisclosed data mining” of users’ names and email addresses, used to match them with their LinkedIn profiles.
The feature, the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, is a LinkedIn service used for sales prospecting. When users enter a web conference meeting, the tool automatically sent their user names and email addresses to an Zoom internal company system. This system would then match this data to their LinkedIn profiles, according to a New York Times investigation.
Per The New York Times, the tool also automatically allowed other meeting participants to covertly access this LinkedIn profile data, without Zoom asking for users’ permission or notifying them. That means if a user is in a Zoom meeting – even if they aren’t using their real names – other participants could collect information about their real names, locations, employer names and job titles.
The tool was removed on Thursday as part of several sweeping changes Zoom made in response to snowballing security and privacy concerns. Zoom founder Eric Yuan said in a Wednesday post responding to the concerns that Zoom will freeze the development of its features and instead focusing on security and privacy issues.
“Over the next 90 days, we are committed to dedicating the resources needed to better identify, address and fix issues proactively,” said Yuan. “We are also committed to being transparent throughout this process. We want to do what it takes to maintain your trust.”
Read more: https://threatpost.com/zoom-removes-data...re/154404/