Zoom Video Communications will let paying customers decide which countries their virtual meetings get routed through, a move to assuage clients worried they may be vulnerable to possible Chinese snooping.
The ability to select preferred data centre locations will be available from 18 April, Brendan Ittelson, Zoom chief technology officer, said on Monday in a blog post. Paid users can also opt out of certain locations. Free users will be locked into data centres in their region, which will mean a US-based data centre for many users.
Zoom has gone from being used by 10 million office workers a day to more than 200 million people, including many consumers. The new uses have exposed security flaws with the app’s default privacy settings, thrusting the company into controversy and spurring CEO Eric Yuan to focus on the safety concerns.
Researchers from the University of Toronto found that some Zoom calls had been routed through data centres in China despite none of the users being based in the country, raising the spectre that the data might be accessible to the Chinese government. The company said it would stop routing calls through China unless one of the participants was based there.
Zoom has 19 data centres, which are shared with other tenants, and also uses cloud computing services from Amazon.com and Oracle. — Reported by Nico Grant, (c) 2020 Bloomberg LP
