Video calling app Zoom’s iOS version was sharing user data with Facebook, a report showed as the popularity of the app rapidly rose with more people working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Research launched by Vice's tech branch Motherboard revealed that the app has been secretly sharing analytical data with Facebook, even if the user doesn't have an account on the social media platform.
According to the report, the shared data included the time the app is launched, device and location information, phone carrier, and other analytical information that would be used for creating targeted ads.
The report said that Zoon is able to share the data with Facebook because the video calling app uses Facebook's software development kits (SDKs). That means that when Zoom is downloaded it automatically connects to the Facebook Graph API.
Following the report, Zoom issued an update for its iOS app on Friday to remove code that sent user data to Facebook.
A statement issued by Zoom Friday said: “Zoom takes its users’ privacy extremely seriously. We originally implemented the ‘Login with Facebook’ feature using the Facebook SDK in order to provide our users with another convenient way to access our platform. However, we were recently made aware that the Facebook SDK was collecting unnecessary device data."
"The data collected by the Facebook SDK did not include any personal user information, but rather included data about users’ devices such as the mobile OS type and version, the device time zone, device OS, device model and carrier, screen size, processor cores, and disk space," the statement said.
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