Currently governments, health providers, education providers, businesses/corporations are using Zoom as a communication tool during COVID-19. My family have recently been asked to use zoom to access a specific health/community service and I expressed my concerns about privacy. The reply was that zoom calls are encrypted and passwords used and hence the IT director is happy for them to continue using it that way. This puts us in an uncomfortable position of having to have back and forth discussions (and potentially stressful confrontations) with the provider to ensure we have the right to secure private communication lines when sharing sensitive health information, when we also desperately need to access the service.
The foremost question is if even Queensland police does not have the technology to ensure that zoom is secure (https://bit.ly/352bpqn), then how would IT professionals overseeing smaller organisations with less resources while handling sensitive data be happy for their organisation to continue with zoom. Also “If you think Zoom does end-to-end encryption you are wrong - they offer transport encryption, which means everything you do on Zoom [might be easily unencrypted on Zoom servers] (https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting-encryption/)” source: https://tacticaltech.org/#/news/technology-is-stupid.
There are some discussions already within the choice community including a request for Choice to conduct testing and analysis of on line conferencing tools -
Online Conferencing - which tool [request to test]
Secrecy, privacy, security, intrusion
Have to agree with the request for Choice to carry out testing and analysis. This needs to be prioritised, considering the current, unquestioning and pervasive use of zoom across the world and what appears to be a gung-ho attitude of various IT professionals involved in recommending and implementing this technology in various work/community settings etc, despite widely publicised concerns about privacy.
