Walter Helwich: Is it safe to use Zoom for individual or group video calls?

The use of Zoom has exploded after the state of alarm was decreed due to the Coronavirus pandemic, but its massive use has revealed a series of existing vulnerabilities in the application that have been rectified. Here, IT specialist Walter Helwich explains it to us all there is to know about this cloud meetings app.

The evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated confinement of citizens has brought about the widespread use of videoconferences and chat applications such as Zoom, Skype, WebEx, Houseparty, Google Meet (Hangouts) or Microsoft Teams.

Specifically, data reveals that individual and collective video calls through the Zoom application have shot up 4,076% compared to the days before the alarm status was decreed, according to data gathered by Walter Helwich, an expert in Information Technology.

However, its massive use has revealed a series of existing vulnerabilities in the application, which has generated concern among users. This circumstance has been reflected in the queries received through the WhatsApp number launched by in order to deal with #Coronabul.

The website, with whom Walter Helwich is in contact these days to collaborate in curbing the fake news about the coronavirus, has already addressed this issue, and this is what it is known so far:

Send data to Facebook from iOS even if you did not have an account on the social network

The American medium specialized in Vice technology was the one that brought to light one of the first problems detected in Zoom recently. Specifically, on March 23 it revealed that the application that was installed on mobile devices with the iOS (Apple) operating system shared user data with Facebook, even in cases where they were not registered through their account at the cited social network, something that the service did not specify in its policies.

Among the data sent to Facebook was the user's browsing information on the service: when the application was opened, details of the device, location, telephone company and a unique advertising identifier used for targeted advertising.

Given this, Zoom published a statement acknowledging that the Facebook tools "collected unnecessary information" for the operation of the video conferencing service and, therefore, decided to remove them from its iOS application.

In this way, authentication in this service with the Facebook account is no longer possible from iOS devices, but it is still enabled in the version of Zoom for browsers.