Zoom’s new privacy policy

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:

Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act,
More on Zoom and privacy, and
Helping Zoom

Those concerns were shared by Consumer Reports, Forbes and others as well.

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).

Zoom calls those websites—its home pages—”marketing websites.” This, I suppose, is so they can isolate their involvement with adtech (tracking-based advertising) 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, apply across everything Zoom does.

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 they’ll be in a much better position to trumpet their commitment to privacy.

Still, this privacy policy rewrite is a big help. So thank you, Zoom, for listening.