
Crime
Zoom shares your information with Facebook, lawsuit says
In the coronavirus pandemic, one app reigns supreme: Zoom, the video-conferencing app that allows you to easily add individuals or groups for informal chats or business meetings. Many teachers are using it to keep classes going for schools and universities closed by COVID-19. On Monday, a Zoom user filed a class action lawsuit against Zoom,…

In the coronavirus pandemic, one app reigns supreme: Zoom, the video-conferencing app that allows you to easily add individuals or groups for informal chats or business meetings. Many teachers are using it to keep classes going for schools and universities closed by COVID-19.
On Monday, a Zoom user filed a class action lawsuit against Zoom, for sending user data to Facebook.
The legal action follows reporting by VICE’s Motherboard which analyzed the Zoom iOS app, and found it sent analytic data to Facebook once opened.
Here’s the lawsuit. It was first reported today by Bloomberg News, which has a paywall.
The lawsuit argues that Zoom violated California’s new data protection law by not obtaining proper consent from users about the transfer of the data, reports Motherboard’s Joseph Cox, whose previous investigation kicked off all the legal action this week.
Meme, creator unknown, March 2020
Excerpt:
“Defendant knew or should have known that the Zoom App security practices were inadequate to safeguard the Class members’ personal information and that the risk of unauthorized disclosure to at least Facebook was highly likely. Defendant failed to implement and maintain reasonable security procedures and practices appropriate to the nature of the information to protect the personal information of Plaintiff and the Class members,” the lawsuit, which was first reported by Bloomberg, reads.
By analyzing the network traffic of the Zoom iOS app, Motherboard found that when opened, the app sent information about the the user’s device such as the model, the city and timezone they are connecting from, which phone carrier they are using, and a unique advertiser identifier created by the user’s device.
Days after Motherboard informed Zoom of the data transfer, the company issued a statement confirming the analysis. Zoom also pushed an update to the app to remove the code which sent the data.
Read more at VICE:
Zoom Faces Class Action Lawsuit for Sharing Data with Facebook
State-sponsored hackers are using COVID-19 as cover for espionage, report from Google’s Threat Analysis Group shows
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How Pong’s inventor gave Woz a hack to bring color to the Apple II
In 1977, Steve “Woz” Wozniak used a neat hack to bring color to the Apple II computer. According to IEEE Spectrum, the obscure trick, called NTSC artifact color, “allows digital systems without specialized graphics hardware to produce color images by exploiting quirks in how TVs decode analog video signals.” That hack later was employed by […]
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Vudu, Walmart’s streaming service, to be bought by Comcast-owned Fandango
Fandango dang sure isn’t selling movie theater tickets anymore. And Walmart appears to be easing out of the video-on-demand business, and into… something else.
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Google Script brings the full power of Google right into your app builds and this training can help you master it
Google Apps Script might be one of the most popular “cheat codes” in all of programming. Of course, it’s not really a cheat, per se. It’s actually just a lightweight, simplified coding method for integrating the vast wealth of data in Google’s suite of apps, everything from Google Sheets to Gmail to Google Docs to […]
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Become a founding memberThe CleanKey cuts your exposure to infected surfaces by opening doors and pressing buttons for you
We all know it’s a different world out there now than the one where we made New Year’s resolutions and waited for the end of winter just a few months ago. If you weren’t a germaphobe then, it’s likely the onset of COVID-19 has at least made you much more conscious of the spread of […]
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This training bootcamp in Amazon Web Services can help make you a cloud professional
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