As many businesses struggle to survive during the Covid-19 pandemic, those providing remote conferencing services are seeing their user engagement rocket. With the lockdown forcing employees in all sectors to work from home, they are relying on services such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Houseparty to stay in touch with colleagues, clients, family and friends.
However it hasn't all been plain sailing for these video conferencing services:
Zoom
Currently the most popular app on the apple and android app store, the boom for Zoom has seen the company's share price double since the start of year; especially impressive given the rest of the market has crashed. Even Boris Johnson and his cabinet are using Zoom's service.
However, questions over Zoom's security overshadow this meteoric rise. The FBI has warned about the practice of 'Zoom-bombing', where trolls access an open meeting and share hate imagery or pornography and use threatening language.
Zoom's claim that it offers end-to-end encryption also isn't quite true as, even when a meeting is locked, Zoom itself is able to access it. New York Attorney General, Letitia James, has written to Zoom stating her office's concern that its security systems are not effective enough to cope with the current surge in usage.
Zoom has also had to apologise for sending analytics data from its iOS app to Facebook without users' permission; this apology hasn't stopped a class action lawsuit being filed against Zoom in California alleging it breached the California Consumer Privacy Act . Would Zoom have also breached GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018?
Houseparty
Houseparty has also flourished during the Covid-19 crisis, with downloads of the app rising from an average of 130,000 a week at mid-February to 2m a week in the middle of March. Previously the app was popular amongst millennials and Gen Z, but the lockdown has meant older generations have also started using the app.
However, a smattering of tweets appeared on 29 March 2020 claiming that after users had downloaded Houseparty's app, they found their login details for other accounts (such as Paypal, Spotify and Amazon) had been compromised. These tweets snowballed and soon reputable news outlets worldwide were writing on the potential Houseparty hack.
Houseparty has categorically denied the claims and believes it is the victim of a smear campaign. Houseparty is so confident it has offered $1million to any person able to provide evidence that rumours it has been hacked are part of a paid social media smear campaign. Even if Houseparty are able to prove the smear campaign, will the damage already have been done?
Microsoft Teams
Despite a 500% increase in meetings, calls and conferences as (at March 13), Teams has not benefitted from the lockdown to the same extent as Zoom. Reuters reported that Zoom's average mobile user numbers in March were nearly three times that of Teams.
Teams has also faced some technical problems, including a major outage of its chat function across Europe earlier in March.
However, the clairvoyants at Microsoft have recognised the trend of working from home beyond the Covid-19 crisis and look to capitalise by adding Teams to their Microsoft 365 package.
WebEx
Although WebEx has been more inconspicuous than its rivals, it too has seen an uptick in usage with 6.7 billon minutes reported in the period 1 – 19 March, when compared with just 6 billion for the whole of February.
Despite its slightly clunky interface, WebEx offers true end-to-end encryption. Will WebEx be able to take advantage of flaws in their rivals' security systems?
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