Zoom iOS App Caught Sharing User Data With Facebook!

With the growing number of people worldwide now trying to adapt to the ‘work-from-home’ situation amid the Covid-19 outbreak. Millions of public and students started using Zoom , the video conferencing app and facilitates smoother remote work witnessed a huge spike in their user base, with the coworkers while working from home, was sending data to Facebook without disclosing the data sharing to customers.

Motherboard which is the technology branch of the news outlet Vice recently conducted a research which reportedly revealed that the iOS app of Zoom has been sharing analytical data with the social media giant Facebook. They also found out that the data that was being shared was irrespective of the fact the particular user has a Facebook account or not.

Apart from the analytical data that can be used to create targeted promotional ads, the list of other important data types that are being shared are time of the app launch, device information, location or GPS information and phone carrier information.

It’s been found out that the video conferencing app Zoom is using Facebook’s software development kits (SDKs) which in turn enables it to share user data with the social media platform even if their use has not linked social media account. Therefore, as soon as a user decides to launch the Zoom app, it connects to the Facebook Graph API immediately.

Now it is important to note here that using Facebook SDKs isn’t a new practice and developers have been long doing so to quickly add new features to their apps. However, it is important that the developers or makers of the app inform their users about the data-sharing practices according to the terms of use by Facebook.

In the case of Zoom, while it has been mentioned that data related to a user’s Facebook profile may be shared with third parties by the app in their privacy policy, there isn’t any explicit mention of Facebook being a third party. This means no indication is given to users about the collection of data for users who either do not have a Facebook account or chose not to link their Facebook account with Zoom. The report says.

Motherboard’s research was further corroborated by Will Strafach who is an iOS researcher and founder of privacy-focused iOS app Guardian.

As of today, Zoom has updated its iOS app to remove the SDK that was providing data to Facebook through the Login with Facebook feature, according to Motherboard, the site that first discovered Zoom's data sharing practices.

Zoom was providing Facebook with data that included when a user opened the app, plus their timezone, city, and device details. Zoom's privacy policy did not make it clear that the data was shared with Facebook.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Zoom said that Zoom was unaware that the Facebook SDK was collecting unnecessary device data.

"Zoom takes its users' privacy extremely seriously. We originally implemented the 'Login with Facebook' feature using the Facebook SDK in order to provide our users with another convenient way to access our platform. However, we were recently made aware that the Facebook SDK was collecting unnecessary device data."

"The data collected by the Facebook SDK did not include any personal user information, but rather included data about users' devices such as the mobile OS type and version, the device time zone, device OS, device model and carrier, screen size, processor cores, and disk space."

"We will be removing the Facebook SDK and reconfiguring the feature so that users will still be able to login with Facebook via their browser. Users will need to update to the latest version of our application once it becomes available in order for these changes to take hold, and we encourage them to do so. We sincerely apologize for this oversight, and remain firmly committed to the protection of our users' data."

Motherboard has since verified that the iOS app is no longer sending data to Facebook when it is opened.