On Thursday, video-calling service Zoom announced that it would no longer grant requests from the Chinese government to remove hosts or participants from meetings if it concerns users that are located in mainland China.
The move was the platform's latest move to give in to pressure after its sudden rise to popularity amid the coronavirus pandemic. The crisis has led people to stay at home for work and education-related activities, as reported by CNBC.
Fame and criticism
Zoom had previously faced criticisms over its security capabilities as several issues such as meeting interruptions, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities plagued its platform. The company, however, took immediate steps to correct the problems.
Earlier this month, Humanitarian China, a US-based civil-rights group that was founded by Zhou Fengsuo, announced that their Zoom account was shut down after citizens commemorated the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. The Chinese government forbode citizens from attending or observing the event.
The videoconferencing platform announced on Wednesday that it did shut the account down but later reinstated it.
Zhou stated that the move was a major setback and explaining that several other major videoconferencing platforms are blocked in mainland China, such as Google Meet which limits who can access the Tiananmen commemoration.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Zoom defended its actions by saying that it was required to follow the requests to comply with local laws as with any other global company.
One spokesman for the company said when a meeting is conducted between participants from different countries; the users are required to follow their local laws and regulations.
The decision by Zoom to shut the account down sparked concerns among users and individuals of the surveillance of the Chinese government.
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Reason for the shutdown
Zhou, along with several others, had demanded to know from the platform the details of when and how their account violated the previously agreed upon terms and conditions. They also wanted to know whether or not the videoconferencing platform gave personal account information to the Chinese capital.
Zoom promised that in the future, it would deny the Chinese government's requests to affect users that are not located in mainland China. The platform's officials also added they would expand and improve their systems that remove or block users based on location.
Researchers at Citizen Lab, a security research group that has connections at the University of Toronto, said in April that Zoom, under specific circumstances, stored encryption keys inside servers in China.
The company revealed that data of meetings were mistakenly transferred through Chinese servers after a traffic surge in February that it has since corrected.
Zoom has announced that they are improving their global policy in responding to requests of blocking users from meetings. It also noted that it would reveal the outline of the policy report for transparency that will be published on June 30.
Last week, the company's CEO, Eric Yuan, said that they hoped to work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to respond to users that intend to use the platform for malicious activities. Yuan also stated that they did not want to provide end-to-end encryption service to an individual who does not wish to pay for it.
