Zoom has been all over the internet in the last few weeks with more people working from home due to the coronavirus outbreak. And as more people are starting to use the service, it’s getting a lot more attention than before, with people discovering interesting new things about how the service works.

As it turns out, Zoom is actually a privacy nightmare. Motherboard is reporting today that the Zoom iOS app silently sends user data to Facebook even if the user does not have a Facebook account.

You see, Zoom’s iOS app uses a Facebook SDK that connects to Facebook’s Graph API and sends data to Facebook automatically. According to the report, the Zoom app shares data about a user’s device model, their time zone, the city they are connecting from, their phone carrier, when the user opens the app, and a unique advertiser ID used for targeting ads, etc. to Facebook.

The problem here is that Zoom apparently does all of this without making it clear to the user on their privacy policy. “That’s shocking. There is nothing in the privacy policy that addresses that,” Pat Walshe, an activist from Privacy Matters.

Zoom’s privacy policy does note that the company may collect details on your Facebook account when you log in to Zoom products using Facebook, but it mentions nothing about sharing data with Facebook when users don’t even have a Facebook account.

The latest find joins a growing list of privacy problems in Zoom. The company’s app was recently found to let hosts of calls track if participants have the Zoom app open or not to be able to track their attention during a call.

Tagged with Privacy, Zoom