>Do you love the company, its leadership, its product, or its pricing?
you didn't ask me, but imo they haven't existed long enough to garnish love for their company and leadership.
They had a product and a price point at a time with huge & abnormal sudden demand. I think this alone was enough to make them successful in the short term.
Not OP, I love the company's leadership and the product (not the privacy issue part). It's awesome to see Eric leaving Webex and building a product that seems and sells superior to Webex. It's not that easy to beat yourself at your own game and he's proved. That is one thing I like about Zoom
But that's an integral part of the product. There is a lot of reason for suspicion floating around the company and the product itself, and the long string of security screwups and misdirection confirms every bit of that.
What's the point of having even good functionality if it comes attached to such concerns? Most products have a good side but choosing one is always about picking what's the worst problem that you can live with rather than the best feature.
No, for the majority of people that is a part of the product they do not care about. That's educated tech people at Google, which had to forbid the use of Zoom, and high school teachers alike.
Subtle yet severe privacy invasions do not matter to the glaring majority of people because they cannot associate it with direct consequences.
If I have been using Zoom and the Chinese government now has 200 hours of my facial and speech data, at first it doesn't impact me. I don't see the impact, I don't feel it aside from some people yelling on HN.
The consequences are either subtle and easily dismissed (e.g. ad tech/marketing when Instagram secretly listens to the phone mic and suddenly you see products that were part of the conversation) or severe and too far out to relate it to a Zoom call 23 months ago (e.g. border control when entering China for tourism).
If you're not an activist then chances are you do not care about online privacy.
I think people care when they are properly informed, in a setting where they are ready to hear such information. The primary reason they seem not to care is because "everyone is using X, so I guess it can't be that bad" and an information/concern overload.
We are constantly bombarded with new concerns and this particular topic requires expert opinion to truly know which software you can trust. Then there is the problem of choosing which expert to trust. And you still have to have time left simply to live your life. It's just not an easy thing to let yourself be concerned with this.
In my personal experience, I've yet to meet a person that turned out not to care once I've taken the time to discuss this with them one on one.
Do you love the company, its leadership, its product, or its pricing?