How secure is Zoom?
I asked myself the same question earlier today after reading Doc Searls’ post about the privacy problems with Zoom and then took it down after reading his post on their revised privacy policy.
Now, here I am putting it up again.
Today, The Intercept published an article about Zoom’s “end to end” encryption and it raises some valid questions about security. I’m not even going to pretend that I understood all the technical aspects of it, but they settled on the concept that it might be possible for Zoom to monitor and/or record your video chat sessions.
There are various levels of “secure” and if you’re a medical professional, what I can definitely tell you is that the Free and Base Paid tiers of Zoom’s service is *not* HIPAA compliant. To get that, you have to order their $200/month service which feels pretty steep to me. There are other HIPAA compliant services available for lower cost.
We all know how fun HIPAA compliance is.
So, how secure is Zoom? Probably pretty secure. The Intercept noted that monitoring your video and audio would have to be done at the Zoom server level and it’s unlikely that someone on your same local network would be able to monitor your calls. Since most of us are using this to work from home now, I guess that would mean the dog hacking the router would not be a threat.
Still it’s wise to do a little digging on the hot new thing before adopting it. As a IT guy once told me, nothing is 100% secure. If it’s hooked up to the Internet and someone wants to get it bad enough, they’ll get to it if they have enough resources.
Here’s to hoping all the people that want to do us harm have limited resources.
(H/T to Set Sail Digital for posting the article that sent me back down the rabbit hole again this afternoon.