In the list of applications that have benefited most from the pandemic that has spread in recent months, the name of Zoom is certainly among the first.
In a very short time it acquired millions of users (including institutions such as schools) and, despite having had to face a whole series of problems, it managed to stay afloat and, indeed, for many it became synonymous with "videoconferencing" .
One of Zoom's weak points, at least in the beginning, was security: the calls showed serious privacy problems and those who wanted to sneak into them found it all too easy.
Over time, Zoom, accessible also in a free version, has remedied the biggest problems, yet the overall behavior has always been a bit ambiguous.
The latest announcement proves it. The app has announced full support for end-to-end encryption (given that the encryption originally employed was not very secure), but will limit it to paid versions.
Those who use Zoom for free will therefore find themselves making "unencrypted" calls: in other words, it will be possible to intercept and decode the data flow without difficulty.
From Zoom's point of view, this makes perfect sense: since the application is what generates the company's revenues, offering advanced functions only to those who pay for the service is only normal.
How many - and they are several - use the free edition would do well to consider whether it is worthwhile to continue to remain faithful to Zoom or if it is not better, for the privacy of your video conferences, to rely on one of the many alternatives.
Zoom, for its part, justifies the unequal treatment not by relying on narrow economic issues, but by the commitment against any illegal use of the platform.
"We intend to offer end-to-end encryption to those users whose identity we can verify" or, in other words, the paying ones. "Users of the free version register via an email address, which does not provide enough information for identity verification."
This is leveraged by Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, who stresses that thanks to this choice, law enforcement agencies and investigative agencies such as the American FBI can have easy access to conversations, which greatly facilitates investigations.
The idea behind it is that criminals who use Zoom to coordinate themselves only use the free, interceptable edition, and do not want to pay or provide proof of their identity in exchange for a version that is not interceptable, through which they could therefore exchange any information without another - not even the FBI - finding out, even if the identity is verified.
