SUPREME COURT ISSUES NOTICE TO CENTRE TO BAN ZOOM APP

On Friday, the supreme court proposed the government to take appropriate action in regards to the petition asking Video Conferencing app ‘Zoom’ to be banned for official and personal purposes. Once again Zoom App has been accused of breaching privacy.

While Zoom turned out to be a great platform for conducting meetings, carrying online lectures and webinars, and keeping people connected with family and friends during the lockdown, it also reaped some spotlight for breaching privacy. A few weeks back the government of India asked the citizen to avoid using the Zoom Applications video conferencing platform as it was accused of breaching privacy. In the latest notice, the Supreme Court has asked Central to put a ban on the Zoom app until an adequate decision is taken.

In a seating led by Chief Justice of India, S.A. Bobde passed a notice to Centre pitting forward the privacy concerns. The Court in his notice asked the government to file a reply within four weeks.

S.A. Bond’s who headed the Three-Judge Supreme Court panel asked the Zoom Video App and the Central Government to present their written responses.

The hackers can easily get access to online classes, meetings, and conferences through this application due to its poor privacy security. The information can be skillfully leaked and can get passed to the third parties because of a bug present in the application. A petition stated that the application has been falsely claiming that the application is a safe and secure platform and the calls are totally encrypted.

The petition further stated that the Zoom app has recently apologized to the users for mistakenly taking traffic from China where the internet activities are completely monitored by the government.

Furthermore, the petition claims that the Zoom users have also been warned by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) l, an Indian Cyber Security Agency, regarding cybersecurity risks associated with the Zoom Application.

In the defense, the Zoom Application’s spokesperson said that ensuring the privacy of the users is the utmost priority of Zoom. He further included that as per the announcement made on April 1, they are focusing on fulfilling their commitment to security and privacy under their 90-days plan.

Sometime back in May, Zoom application developed a secure messaging and file sharing service named as Keybase to reach current Zoom scalability through an end to end encryption.

After the San Francisco Church lodged a suit against the Zoom App claiming that the app is hacking events, Zoom spokesman in his statement affirmed that any such incidents involving hacking or breach of security should be immediately reported.

The petition further emphasized that in the time when business and education is being conducted online, people are investing their time and efforts online. Cybercrime is spreading its roots and the incidents of breach of cybersecurity are increasing day by day, the government is taking measures to educate people to be aware of such cyber-crimes and not become prey for cybercriminals.

 

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