The coronavirus made everyone stay at home and practicing social distancing. All the organizations offered work from home for their employees during the current pandemic. During the crisis, the zoom app has gained huge popularity among the users. However, the growing popularity of the Zoom also raised concerns about its privacy and security. The new allegations also raise the question of whether Zoom is an American company or a foreign company.
Is Zoom an American company?
Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, refuted all the speculations through his latest blog post. He clearly mentioned that Zoom is an American company, founded and headquartered in California.
Yuan also disclosed that he has lived in America since 1997 and became an American citizen in July 2007.
He stated Zoom is a global company with 21 offices around the world, including Australia, Japan, France, and elsewhere. Just like any other multinational company, Zoom also said to have operations and employees in China.
While the company has a total of 17 global co-located data centers, only one of them is in China.
According to the blog post, this data center in China is in facilities run by a leading Australian company and is geofenced.
Regarding privacy concerns, he said the vulnerabilities that were discovered one after the other created the impression that Zoom is not secure. However, it has a dedicated team working full-time to finds and fix vulnerabilities.
Will be transparent about security & privacy issues
Additionally, he also said his company is striving to be completely transparent about its security and privacy issues by informing its users regularly through webinars and blogs.
While it had only 10 million daily meeting participants back in December, the number has risen to 300 million in April.
Both the Microsoft Teams and Google Meet are made available for all in order to share a pie of the growing video conferencing market.
Last month, the company released an update that gives the paid users to choose the data center regions for routing their meetings. After the April 24th update, the data of free users outside of China will never be routed through China.
In the coming weeks, the lockdown situation across the world will be eased. The employees might prefer work from home than going outside until the current pandemic is totally wiped out. Amid the COVID-19 crisis, gathering through video conferencing apps like Zoom is the new normal for our world.