Zoom Clients Get New Call Controls To Choose Data Routing

Zoom Video Communications Inc. ZM will now allow paid customers to opt-in or out of data center regions, a move designed to help lessen anxieties surrounding Chinese monitoring.

What Happened

On Monday, Brendan Ittelson, CTO of Zoom, posted a blog announcing that from April 18, customers who purchase --would be able to customize data center regions for their real-time meeting traffic.

Once users have selected a default region, it will be locked and cannot be changed. The company said it believes for most of its users, that would be the United States.

Free users would be locked to the default region where their account is provisioned. The company assured, “Data of free users outside of China will never be routed through China.” For users on mainland China, if their account admin has not opted to use the China data center by April 25, their account would not be able to connect to the China data center for data transit.

Why It Matters

The use of Zoom has increased significantly due to the ongoing pandemic. In December 2019, Zoom had 10 million daily paid and free users, but by March 2020, the number had skyrocketed to 200 million daily users.

Zoom has been plagued by multiple security and privacy concerns, which led to the launch of an investigation by Schubert Jonckheer & Kolbe, a law firm that litigates on behalf of investors. New York’s schools have already banned the use of Zoom for remote teaching purposes.

The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab discovered that Zoom had used servers in China to deliver data packets, even when all meeting participants were located outside of China. The lab raised concerns that sending encryption keys via servers in China could leave Zoom vulnerable to requests from Chinese authorities to disclose the said keys.

The videoconferencing company has assured users that their servers in China have always been geofenced ensure “meeting data of users outside of China, stays outside of China.” Zoom claims they have now removed all their HTTPS tunneling servers from China to prevent any “inadvertent connection through China.”

Price Action

Zoom shares traded 2.04% higher at $138.69 in the after-hours session on Monday. The shares had closed the regular session 9.16% higher at $135.92.