> I understand the security advantages of using zoom on a laptop not > much used for anything else. I suppose the sercurity conern is files > being accessible to intruders. Someone made the interesting suggestion > of settin up a new account just for zoom.
The concern about using any gratis commercial videoconferencing service is that quite a bit of biometric information can be collected from you - in particular your voice and your face. Your personal files are just a bonus. Recall a while ago some company called clearview.ai made the news - given a picture of a person it finds all the other photos of that person online, and does a good job of it too. Any videoconferencing service is remarkably well positioned to generate an excellent facial model of you - given that there is a bit of motion and much data of you staring at the camera, a high-quality 3D model of your face can be constructed easily. This biometric information can be abused in so many ways, most of which are still to be invented. But recall the cambridge analytica scandal. It was supposed to have used rubbish online personality quizzes to generate custom ads to fix elections and referenda - with some success. Reportedly it is the reason brexit actually happened ... Now instead of having to rely on "do you like cats or dogs", the propaganda developers get to actually check out your microexpressions and changes in voice pitch... while A/B testing their evil on you. Anyway, if you value your free will then not using closed source video conferencing systems is a must. Similarly if you value your ability enter a store without hostile marketing logic giving you digital patdown... Remember the occasional news article showing off the big chinese control centres monitoring the cameras in some far away city, with a neat little onscreen name following every person walking down the street ? Odds are quite good that your video conferencing use will make it possible to add your name to that list. Some people are going to say "not possible, the call is end-to-end encrypted". Actually no. Illustrative example: The intercept reported that zoom claimed end-to-end encryption, but instead had one shared key, and used ECB (a really poor way of using a cypher). That is why it works so well, as a single lost packet doesn't garble the rest of the stream. More importantly, unlike Balsamic Vinegar or Zero Percent Fat, there is little enforcement of what these terms mean, and governments are keen to weaken encryption further. So if you ever hear "end-to-end video encryption" it is wise to assume "encrypted from your end to their data centre end". It is fashionable to use zoom as an example, given their strong connections to mainland china, but odds are excellent that this is happening on services too, where it is probably done better and more discretely. It is probably also the reason why tiktok is in the news regards marc _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng