Meir's Monthly Learning Article

This month I want to use Zoom’s security issues to highlight why security is one of Amazon’s highest priorities. As a result of worldwide shelter in place orders, human connection technology usage has spiked to unprecedented levels. Zoom, a remote conferencing product suite, has added more monthly active users in Q1 2020 than in all of 2019. But, with increased usage comes increased appetite to hack products and platforms. Although Zoom likely wants to focus on pleasing their influx of customers, they are instead firefighting their product’s significant security concerns.

Accessibility and security are opposing forces. Products struggle to find the balance between fully accessible (but insecure) and fully secure (but inaccessible). Ultimately, security must win because security breaches break customer trust and prevent future customer interactions. It is likely that Zoom’s security problems will cause some of Zoom’s recent customers to never return; this is why Amazon obsesses over security. We prioritize security before our products hit mass market appeal so we never break our customers’ trust.

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/zoom-security-privacy-woes

“There are good reasons Zoom has taken off and other platforms haven’t. Zoom is easy to set up, easy to use and lets up to 100 people join a meeting for free. It just works.

But there’s a downside. Zoom’s ease of use makes it easy for troublemakers to ‘bomb’ open Zoom meetings, and for hackers to inject malware into a machine running Zoom.  There’s also been a lot of scrutiny about Zoom’s privacy policy, which until recently seemed to give Zoom the right to do whatever it saw fit with any user’s personal data.”