Yesterday (March 29), Zoom updated its privacy policy with a major rewrite. The new language is far more clear than what it replaced, and which had caused the concerns I detailed in my previous three posts:
Those concerns were shared by Consumer Reports, Forbes and others as well. (Here’s Consumer Reports‘ latest on the topic.)
Mainly the changes clarify the difference between Zoom’s services (what you use to conference with other people) and its websites, zoom.us and zoom.com (which are just one site: the latter redirects to the former). As I read the policy, nothing in the services is used for marketing. Put another way, your Zoom sessions are firewalled from adtech, and you shouldn’t worry about personal information leaking to adtech (tracking based advertising) systems.
The websites are another matter. Zoom calls those websites—its home pages—”marketing websites.” This, I suppose, is so they can isolate their involvement with adtech to their marketing work.
The problem with this is an optical one: encountering a typically creepy cookie notice and opting gauntlet (which still defaults hurried users to “consenting” to being tracked through “functional” and “advertising” cookies) on Zoom’s home page still conveys the impression that these consents, and these third parties, work across everything Zoom does, and not just its home pages.
And why call one’s home on the Web a “marketing website”—even if that’s mostly what it is? Zoom is classier than that.
My advice to Zoom is to just drop the jive. There will be no need for Zoom to disambiguate services and websites if neither is involved with adtech at all. And Zoom will be in a much better position to trumpet its commitment to privacy.
That said, this privacy policy rewrite is a big help. So thank you, Zoom, for listening.
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