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Stop Blaming the Victims of Zoombombing
Locks are for honest people, not assholes.
Since the Coronavirus pandemic has made Zoom the default meeting space for millions, reports have surged of assholes storming people’s living rooms with all manner of disgusting attacks. These home invasions have included profanity, racist slurs, Nazi propaganda, and non-consensual nudity, even in classrooms for children.
The usual responses I see to these incidents of “Zoombombing” are one or both of the following:
- Zoom engineers need to improve their security settings.
- Zoom users need to use the security settings properly.
Neither of these responses is incorrect, per se, especially the first. Zoom’s CEO has acknowledged that their product’s existing security features are inadequate, and the company is working to enhance them. Especially given that Zoom stands to profit enormously from the greatly increased use of their product during the pandemic, the company has the resources and ethical obligation to improve their product’s security to the greatest possible extent.
When it comes to the end users, however, blaming them for not configuring the software correctly is unhelpful at best…
