Zoom won’t encrypt calls made by users on the free plan so that it can work with the FBI and local enforcement agencies to trace down repeat offenders and spammers, CEO Eric Yaun told investors on the company’s Q1 2021 earnings call. The end-to-end encryption feature, which is at the moment in beta stages, will be soon available exclusively to enterprise and paid clients.
“Free users, for sure, we don’t want to give that [end-to-end encryption]. Because we also want to work it together with FBI and local law enforcement, in case some people use Zoom for bad purposes,” Yuan added.
The surge in demand for telecommunications services due to the coronavirus pandemic had caught Zoom by surprise. As the company’s figures and daily users soar, it has scrambled to patch its many privacy flaws that have been actively abused by intruders to hack into calls and spawned issues such as Zoombombing.
Most of these intruders, as one might guess, are on Zoom’s free tier, and the company hopes to make it easier for law enforcement agencies to crack down on them when a host reports abuse on a call.
Data of Zoom calls is only encrypted in transit and not at the end destinations. This means that it can be potentially accessed and viewed by Zoom’s employees.
Alex Stamos, an independent security and privacy consultant to Zoom, claimed that Zoom itself won’t misuse the absence of end-to-end encryption to “proactively monitor content in meetings and will not in the future. “Zoom doesn’t record meetings silently. Neither of these will change,” he wrote in a tweet.
Stamos added that while this won’t eliminate all abuse, it will “create fiction and reduce harm” since “the vast majority of harm comes from self-service users with fake identities.”
To build its end-to-end encryption, which will remain optional for enterprise customers, Zoom acquired Keybase, a software startup that develops several encryption-focused services. Zoom, however, has yet to share a release date for its end-to-end encryption feature. In March, after a report published by The Intercept, the company issued an apology and backtracked on a false claim on its website which said calls were end-to-end encrypted.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.