Zoom is showing how to Respond to Criticism the Right Way

Sometimes it takes years of criticism to get a company to do the right thing. Every once in a while, it can happen overnight.

Appearing before a background that said “we care” over an image of a heart-shaped planet Earth, Zoom CEO Eric S. Yuan said Sunday on CNN that despite the company’s recent security problems, its “intentions are good.”

“We moved too fast… and we had some missteps,” Yuan said in an interview with CNN’s Brian Stelter. “We’ve learned our lessons and we’ve taken a step back to focus on privacy and security.”   Perhaps it’s a case of massive growing pains. in three months, Zoom has gone from an average of 10 million daily users to 200 million daily users.  Yuan earlier told the Wall Street Journal that he “really messed up as CEO” and that he felt “an obligation to win the users’ trust back.”

Yuan’s mea culpae follow a tumultuous few weeks for the videoconferencing platform. Zoom has seen its usage increase dramatically as people confined to their homes due to the COVID-19 pandemic have used it to stay in contact and conduct work and school. Yuan said in an April 1st blog post that the company reached 200 million daily meeting participants in March, up from 10 million in December.

Zoom has been the target of harassment, known as Zoombombing, where unwanted guests invade a meeting. And it’s been riddled with security issues, to the point that the company announced April 2nd it was pausing feature updates for 90 days to focus on privacy and security.

Yuan writes:

For the past several weeks, supporting this influx of users has been a tremendous undertaking and our sole focus. We have strived to provide you with uninterrupted service and the same user-friendly experience that has made Zoom the video-conferencing platform of choice for enterprises around the world, while also ensuring platform safety, privacy, and security. However, we recognize that we have fallen short of the community’s – and our own – privacy and security expectations. For that, I am deeply sorry, and I want to share what we are doing about it.

Yuan’s list of next steps is long and impressive. In addition to the feature development freeze, the company said it would conduct a “comprehensive review” with outside experts and users to understand the challenges that have come with such rapid expansion. It will improve its bug bounty program and form a council of chief information security officers. And Yuan will begin hosting a weekly webinar to update users on the company’s progress.

And it’s in addition to some other steps, all announced Thursday — like fixing its bizarre MacOS installer, which made an end run around normal user permissions and involved using a misleading prompt. And removing a feature that mined users’ LinkedIn profiles without their consent. And patching a Windows vulnerability.

You can password-protect your meeting, but many people don’t — either for convenience, or because they’re unaware of the security risk.  So: there’s still some work to do. And yes, some of that work needs to be done by Zoom’s users. Anyone who is using the app to set up meetings should first read the company’s instructions for ensuring no uninvited guests show up.  But given how vital Zoom will remain in the weeks and months to come, we ought to be glad the company acted as quickly as it did.

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Photo Credit:  Girts Ragelis / Shutterstock.com