Zoom ‘Should Have Done a Better Job’ Managing Privacy, CEO Says; Stock Up After Q1
With “lots of first-time users” signing up during the pandemic, “as a CEO, I think I should have done a better job” managing the security and privacy issues, said Zoom's Eric Yuan. He wishes in hindsight the company had offered…
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more tech support for novice customers, he said on a fiscal Q1 call Tuesday: “This is a mistake I made. So we learned a hard lesson.” The quarter ended April 30. COVID-19 stay-at-home mandates enabled Zoom to peak at more than 300 million daily meeting participants that month, up from 10 million in December, said Yuan. “We continue to see elevated levels of participants even as governments around the world have begun to ease stay-in-place restrictions.” The stock closed up 7.6% higher Wednesday at $223.87. Yuan acknowledged the “negative PR” that Zoom endured about security and privacy after demand spiked. “With good intentions, we opened our platform to unprecedented numbers of first-time users” who lacked the “established protocols for security and privacy” that were endemic to more seasoned “enterprise customers,” he said. Zoom since has “transparently and quickly addressed specific security and privacy issues,” he said. The company blogged about its improvements, amid some criticism (see 2004070053).