Zoom was secretly mining LinkedIn data and sharing it with some users

It’s becoming pretty clear that Zoom was not ready for the influx of users it received due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The latest issue: the service was secretly collecting LinkedIn data and sharing personal information with certain users in Zoom meetings.

According to a report from the New York Times, when a user would enter a video conference, Zoom would take that person’s name and email address and run it through an internal system. This system would then match the name and email of the Zoom user with their LinkedIn profile information.

So, why was this such a problem? Zoom would take the LinkedIn profile data and connect it to the user’s Zoom account, allowing other people in the meeting to view the user’s real name, employer, job title, and location. Zoom did this without notifying the user or asking their permission. The video conferencing platform was able to match a user’s real LinkedIn profile with their Zoom name, even if they weren’t using their real name on the platform.

To see this data, Zoom users just needed to have subscribed to a sales prospecting service called LinkedIn Sales Navigator. However, Zoom’s systems did not require users in the meeting to subscribe to LinkedIn’s service for the video conferencing platform to access it.

The ability to see users’ LinkedIn data has been removed from Zoom as of Thursday.

Zoom has been blowing up in popularity as people across the world look for ways to connect online while self-quarantining. According to the company, it appears it's been overwhelmed by the sudden surge in usage of the app. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan stated that the issue wasn’t just the influx of users, but how the service was created with the intent of serving enterprise or business-to-business users.

The coronavirus has clearly changed Zoom’s customer base.

And as many new users flock to the service, numerous concerning discoveries have been made as it relates to security and privacy on the Zoom platform.

A bug was found that allowed hackers to steal a user’s login credentials through Zoom. It was discovered that the service was unnecessarily sending data to Facebook. Its promotion of encryption on the platform was found to be incorrect.

Zoom announced on Wednesday that it was planning to halt work on new features for the next 90 days so it can focus on these security and privacy issues.