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Comment by Quanttek | Hacker News Reader

> "On March 29th, we updated our privacy policy to be more clear and transparent around what data we collect and how it is used – explicitly clarifying that we do not sell our users’ data, we have never sold user data in the past, and have no intention of selling users’ data going forward."

That is such a dishonest way of framing it. No one was really concerned whether they would "sell" data. The issue was with the exorbitant amount of data they collect and its analysis for commercial purposes, be it ads (which doesn't involve selling data), targeted pricing or providing access to corporate admins.

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Surely as this comes from the FB lib zoom are not an outlier here? Why the sudden pearl clutching at zoom when everyone is using facebook, google and any other site that has facebook tracking built in?

cant help but feel like hit squads from the lagging competition

I agree, this level of synthetic concern doesn't feel like "grass roots".

MS did a terrible job with Skype and Lync. No doubt they were expecting to be able to bind it to exchange server and then create a coupling that embedded into an effective monopoly, creating yet another bad user experience that somehow becomes "the norm".

Hopefully at some point MS will compete by improving their products and we will have a better WFH experience.

I work very hard to keep Facebook out of my life. I run an ad-blocker and I don't log into my (inert) Facebook account outside of privacy mode (or a VM). Unfortunately, I don't have a choice about using Zoom. So it sucks that I'm effectively getting backdoored with this nonsense. Why is it OK to expose my information to an advertising company like Facebook without asking for permission first? Because everyone else does it?

agreed, I'm the same except i have no FB account.

I can't help but feel this sudden Zoom "panic" is coming from large (and incompetent) tech companies who are not happy with an upstart.

This also related to their horrendous privacy policy [0]

[0]: https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2020/03/27/zoom/

> But in the Zoom app, you can’t tell if or how your personal data is being harvested.

> (think, for example, Google Ads and Google Analytics).

> There’s no need to think about those, because both are widely known for compromising personal privacy

No need to think about google. Not sure about that one. Surely there should be more of a panic about google/facebook? Why the sudden zoom moral panic?

> Why the sudden pearl clutching at zoom when everyone is using facebook,

Presumably, as an enterprise solution they have major enterprise customers that may have a corporate policy disallowing facebook and google use.

Was it? The techie community often seems to try to speak for the rest of the world and it doesn't always seem correct.

I would be surprised if much of the rest of the world didn't see a difference between "includes the facebook SDK" and "collects your data, bundles it, and sells it". Especially since such a huge percentage of apps include the facebook SDK. There's been specific research on apps that "overcollect" information and its found that typical users will only pay a few cents more for correctly permissioned apps.

When we talk about Facebook, Google, etc. people commonly believe that "selling data" refers to any, direct or indirect, access third parties gain to the data, as captured by the common phrase of "selling your data to advertisers" used to describe Facebook's practices. So, for most people there is no real, qualitative difference between giving advertisers the ability to use the gathered data to target people with ads on the given platform and (literally) selling that data to advertisers, so that they can target people with ads on a variety of platforms. When companies assert that they are not selling data to third parties, they are using the fuzziness of that term in common usage to imply that the data cannot be used by third parties in any way - which is often not true

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