Zoom iOS App Sends Data to Facebook Even if You Don’t Have a Facebook Account.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/k7e599/zoom-ios-app-sends…
Also: “Zoom, one of the most anticipated tech IPOs of the year, has one key profit driver: engineers in China.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/26/zoom-key-profit-driver-ahead…
Hello Vol,
I cannot totally share your concern, especially the second one:
As to the iOS, a lot fewer people use iOS than Android and I am sure that Zoom will fix this in my view grave violation of privacy. I personally have never used ZM and use only Apple products, all with paid VPN where hopefully my data is safer. However, the iPhone had previous privacy/hacking issues. I only use it for phone calls, texting, and only occasionally use WiFi, always with VPN and never to any of my financial institutions. Hopefully Yuan remedies this gaffe now that China has recovered from the worst.
As to the Coronavirus, I don’t think it had or will have much of an effect on ZM’s China operations. Here is why:
Zoom employees undoubtedly used their own product to continue to work from home when China instituted their draconian measures.
Looking at Zoom’s Chinese subsidiaries and their locations, populations, population density and province infection death and recovery rates it seems clear that they were not at the epicenter of China’s COVID-19 outbreak.
Here are Zoom’s China Subsidiaries according to the S-1_2019-03-22 –I couldn’t find the number of employees in each city– and populations as well as population density:
• Zoom Video Communications Inc, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China.
2018 Prefecture level population 10,721,700, population density, 1,300/sq km or 3,300/sq mi, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzhou
• Saasbee Inc Ltd, Hefei, Anhui Province, China.
2017 Prefecture level city population 7,965,300, Urban (2018)[2] 3,854,000, Urban density 4,600/sq km, (12,000/sq mi), Metro 6,173,000, Metro density 870/sq km (2,300/sq mi), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hefei
• SaasBee Software Ltd, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China
Prefecturelevel & Subprovincial city 10,360,000 • Density 620/sq km (1,600/sq mi), Urban 9,119,000(2,019)• Metro 22,594,000 Hangzhou Metropolitan Area includes Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Jiaxing, Huzhou, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangzhou.
Now let’s have a look how affected by the coronavirus each province was. Also, remember that the more densely populated the area, the more easy it is for the virus to spread and the higher the proportion of people at risk (age, sex, lung disease, etc.) the higher the death rate.
I’ve been keeping track of the outbreak since January. China instituted drastic measures to control the novel coronavirus of 2019 (nCoV-19) and has turned the tide some time ago. Daily confirmed cases are usually no more than a couple, and there were 3 total death between yesterday and today. As I type this, China hat 81,897 cases, 3,296 deaths, 74,720 recovered as per the dashboard of Johns Hopkins U. run by their Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) and one of the most reliable and up-to-date sources of COVID-19 global infections, https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h…. If you click on China you’ll find each province to the right. It only gives the number of deaths and the numbers recovered.
**Province Total Confirmed Total % of Total Total % of Total**
**Cases Deaths Death Recovered Recovered Cases**
All Chinese Provinces 81,987 3,296 100.00% 74,720 100.00%
Jiangsu ? 0 0.00% 631 0.84%
Anhui ? 6 0.18% 984 1.32%
Zhejiang ? 1 0.03% 1,222 1.64%
Hubei (Wuhan) ? 3,174 96.30% 61,732 82.62%
By looking at the percentages of dead and recovered cases in each province I conclude that Zoom’s subsidiaries located in these provinces should be minimally affected, if at all. In addition, even in Hubei province the Chinese government has started to lift some of the restrictions with people resuming their normal lives.
[By the way, another reliable website, see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus for all global cases, for US, see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/. And please listen only to qualified medical people like Dr. Fauci and other epidemiologists.]
As per Saul’s RULES, PLEASE NO DISCUSSIONS OF THE CORONAVIRUS.
I. M. Young
IM Young, thank you for your reasoned reply.
The concern about China is not the coronavirus regardless of whether you believe the stagnant numbers CCP has released. It is the security threat inherent of any company with large Chinese involvement as per Zoom’s own admission:
Despite its cost benefits, Zoom’s presence in China could also pose a security risk going forward. Zoom mostly deals with business customers, who are much more sensitive about data privacy, and having most of its development team based in China could expose the company to increased scrutiny, the filing said.
“We have a high concentration of research and development personnel in China, which could expose us to market scrutiny regarding the integrity of our solution or data security features,” Zoom wrote in its filing.