The Zoom video conferencing platform showed that all direct sales to mainland China as of August 23 as it seeks to distance itself from the country amid the growing surveillance of corporations like TikTok in the United States.
Zoom announced today (August 3) that it will move to a partner-reserved style in China in an email notified via Reuters. Bizconf Communications, Suiri Zhumu Video Conference and Systec Umeet were on the list of partners that may be offering Zoom advertising to consumers in China.
Zoom has already retired in China. In May, it showed that there would be no new records of loose users in the country and that commercial consumers would be limited to those registered through legal sales representatives.
In June, Zoom was criticized after banning 3 users from making memorials to commemorate the Tiananmen Square bloodbath at Beijing’s request. The resolution was annulled, but Thomas Brewster of Forbes explained how the company would help China block the accounts of users in the country.
He had also had problems when researchers discovered that Zoom was sending information through China: the video conferencing company made adjustments temporarily to fix it.
Also in June, the Deputy Justice Department Attorney General John Demers, Hawley and Blumenthal said in a letter that they were “extremely concerned.” Zoom and TikTok had potentially leaked US data to the Communist Party of China (PCCh) and censored the content on behalf of the PCCh.
“While tens of millions of Americans turn to Zoom and TikTok about the COVID-19 pandemic, few know that the confidentiality of their knowledge and freedom of expression are threatened by those companies’ relations with the Chinese government,” the senators wrote. “Of particular concern, Zoom and TikTok have sought to hide and divert attention from their significant ties with China, presenting themselves as U.S. companies.
But the two corporations are very different. TikTok (which is intended to be sold to Microsoft) lately owns a Chinese company based in Beijing, ByteDance. Meanwhile, Zoom was founded in Silicon Valley and its CEO Eric Yuan was born in China, now a U.S. citizen.
Despite this, senators also participated in a Citizen Lab report that Zoom “appears to own 3 corporations in China through which at least 700 workers are paid to expand Zoom software.”
Zoom emailed me a statement, which reads: “Our style of marketing in mainland China includes direct sales, online subscription and sales through spouses. Now we move to a spouse-only style with the Zoom generation built into the spouse offerings, which will offer more local for mainland Chinese users.
“We have informed our consumers that this will take effect on August 23, 2020 and have advised several legal partners. Mainland Chinese users can continue to enroll in Zoom meetings as participants.”
The factor is, of course, political, as Ian Thornton-Trump, a former Canadian Forces intelligence operator and RSSI of risk intelligence firm Cyjax, says. “In a recent testimony before Congress, several witnesses testified about China’s competitive innovation and intellectual property theft. My view is that this is partly a political pimping and everything is similar to the deterioration of China-U.S. relations.
Partnerships, like Microsoft’s with Azure in China, are a mechanism for global corporations to isolate the political ramifications and rhetoric of doing in China, Thornton-Trump says. “They are, from a privacy point of view, necessary.
“The Chinese government is very business in terms of the needs of access to the knowledge of any Chinese citizen, so the presence ‘in the country’ through associations, in all likelihood with close ties with the Chinese government, is the only way to access many companies. . “
So, a practical resolution through Zoom, will it help you save additional scrutiny in the United States, where the focus is on all corporations that are perceived to have an even tenuous connection to China?
I am a freelance cybersecurity journalist with more than a decade of experience in writing news, reviews and articles. Report and analyze cybersecurity and privacy violations
I am a freelance cybersecurity journalist with more than a decade of experience in writing news, reviews and articles. I report and analyze cybersecurity and privacy stories that have a specific interest in cyber warfare, application security, and knowledge misuse through giant generation companies. In addition to Forbes, you can locate my paintings in Wired, The Times, The Economist and The Guardian. Contact me at [email protected].