During this last hard year that we have experienced, video calls have become popular, either for leisure or work reasons. And one of the most popular applications for making video calls is Zoom, which has been sentenced to pay $ 85 million to users for deceiving them.
According to ArsTechnica, the company has been accused of lying in its service description. Zoom advertised itself as an end-to-end encrypted service on its website, which proved to be a lie. What’s more, the company has shared user data with Facebook and Google without permission of the users themselves.
The lawsuit has been filed in the District Court for the Northern District of California, and the proposed settlement will oblige Zoom to compensate users with between 15 and 25 dollars, depending on whether they had a free or paid subscription. This applies to all registered US Zoom users between March 30, 2016 and July 30, 2021, as long as the settlement is approved by the court.
In addition to this compensation to users, Zoom agreed to make more than a dozen major changes, “designed to improve meeting security, strengthen privacy and safeguard consumer data.”
In a statement to MacRumors, a Zoom spokesperson stated the following:
«The privacy and security of our users are top priorities at Zoom, and we take seriously the trust that our users place in us. We are proud of the advancements we have made on our platform, and we look forward to continuing to innovate with privacy and security at the forefront.«.
We will see if these types of agreements are also produced in other countries, Zoom could face new lawsuits for the same reason. At the moment only users in the United States will be compensated, but who knows if in the future this compensation will reach other countries.