Technologies

Zoom privacy risks: The video chat app could be sharing more information than you think

Zoom makes video chatting with colleagues easy, but you might be giving away more than you bargained for.

The Zoom video meeting and chat app skyrocketed in popularity as millions of people looked for new ways to work, study and socialize amid the coronavirus pandemic. With the option to customize your background and newer features such as Immersive View and a vanishing pen tool, it’s easy to see why Zoom’s popularity isn’t dwindling even as COVID-19 vaccines and booster shots roll out and offices become hybrid workplaces. But with all that popularity, comes privacy risks.

From built-in attention-tracking features (which have since been disabled) to exploitable software bugs and issues with «Zoom-bombing» (where uninvited attendees break into and disrupt meetings) — Zoom’s security practices have drawn scrutiny from users worldwide. New York’s Attorney General Letitia James sent Zoom a letter outlining privacy vulnerability concerns in March 2020. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also cautioned users working from home about the software’s onboard privacy features.

Privacy experts previously expressed concerns about Zoom in 2019, when the video-conferencing software experienced both a webcam hacking scandal, and a bug that allowed snooping users to potentially join video meetings they hadn’t been invited to, if those meetings were not protected with a password.

The issues exacerbated by widespread adoption at the start of the pandemic were just the latest chapter in the software’s rocky security history, and prompted Zoom CEO Eric Yuan to respond to concerns in April 2020, freezing feature updates to address security issues over a 90-day update rollout. Though Zoom has since added security features like end-to-end encryption, there are still a few things you should watch out for to keep your chats as private as possible.

Here are some of the privacy vulnerabilities in Zoom that you should watch out for.

Zoom’s cloud recording feature might share meeting video with people outside the call

For paid subscribers, Zoom’s cloud recording feature can either be a life-saver or a catastrophic faux pas waiting to happen. If the feature is enabled on the account, a host can record the meeting along with its text transcription and a text file of any active chats in that meeting, and save it to the cloud where it can later be accessed by other authorized users at your company, including people who may have never attended the meeting in question. Yikes.

As Mashable’s Jack Morse put it, «What that suggests, but doesn’t clarify, is that for non-webinar/standard meetings, your person-to-person chat messages would be later sent to your boss after a call recorded to the cloud.»

Zoom does allow a narrowing of the audience here, however. Administrators can limit the recording’s accessibility to only certain preapproved IP addresses, even if the recording has already been shared. Participants can also see when a meeting is being recorded.

Read more: The best VPN services for 2021

Zoom even shared information with Facebook

By now, you’re used to hearing it from the privacy-minded: Don’t use Facebook to log in to other sites and software unless you want Facebook to have data on what you’re doing. Fair enough. But what to do when Zoom gets caught sending some of your analytics data to Facebook — whether or not you even have a Facebook account?

An analysis by Vice’s Motherboard found the iOS version of the Zoom app doing exactly that. Courtesy of Facebook’s Graph API, Zoom was telling Facebook whenever you opened the Zoom app, what phone or device you were using, and your phone carrier, location and a unique advertising identifier. Motherboard also reported that Zoom had updated its iOS app so the app would stop sending certain data to Facebook.

In a March 2020 blog post, Zoom addressed the issue, noting «our customers’ privacy is incredibly important to us, and therefore we decided to remove the Facebook SDK in our iOS client and have reconfigured the feature so that users will still be able to log in with Facebook via their browser.»

As late as March 2020, Zoom’s privacy policy contained some breezy language about its relationship to third-party data crunchers, which gives one reason to question where else — and to what extent — that data was being shared or sold that we didn’t know about.

«Zoom does use certain standard advertising tools which require Personal Data (think, for example, Google Ads and Google Analytics). We use these tools to help us improve your advertising experience (such as serving advertisements on our behalf across the Internet, serving personalized ads on our website, and providing analytics services),» the policy said at the time. «Sharing Personal Data with the third-party provider while using these tools may fall within the extremely broad definition of the ‘sale’ of Personal Data under certain state laws because those companies might use Personal Data for their own business purposes, as well as Zoom’s purposes.»

But at the end of March, Zoom updated its privacy policy. In a statement following the move, Zoom said that while it wasn’t changing any of its actual practices, it wanted to make its language clearer. Regarding its relationship to third-party data handlers described above, the company drew a line in the sand between its product and its website. «This only pertains to user activity on the zoom.us website. No data regarding user activity on the Zoom platform — including video, audio, and chat content — is ever provided to third parties for advertising purposes,» the company said.

You should probably review your Zoom and device security settings with an eye toward minimizing permissions, and make sure any anti-tracking software on your device is up to date and running.

It may not help, but it can’t hurt.

It’s also important to keep your Zoom app up to date so your privacy is always protected with the latest security patches. Luckily, Zoom recently rolled out a new automatic update feature that makes this process a whole lot more convenient.

For more, check out how to use the sneaky Zoom Escaper tool to get out of your meetings, how to combat Zoom anxiety and Zoom fatigue, and how to make your video meetings a little less weird. And, does Zoom’s free plan have ads now?

Technologies

Anthropic Launched New Claude 4 Gen AI Models. Here’s What They Do

The models can now use tools like web searches during extended reasoning tasks.

The latest versions of Anthropic’s Claude generative AI models made their debut Thursday, including a heavier-duty model built specifically for coding and complex tasks.

Anthropic launched the new Claude 4 Opus and Claude 4 Sonnet models during its Code with Claude developer conference, and executives said the new tools mark a significant step forward in terms of reasoning and deep thinking skills.

The company launched the prior model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, in February. Since then, competing AI developers have also upped their game. OpenAI released GPT-4.1 in April, with an emphasis on an expanded context window, along with the new o3 reasoning model family. Google followed in early May with an updated version of Gemini 2.5 Pro that it said is better at coding.

Claude 4 Opus is a larger, more resource-intensive model built to handle particularly difficult challenges. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said test users have seen it quickly handle tasks that might have taken a person several hours to complete.

«In many ways, as we’re often finding with large models, the benchmarks don’t fully do justice to it,» he said during the keynote event.

Claude 4 Sonnet is a leaner model, with improvements built on Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet model. The 3.7 model often had problems with overeagerness and sometimes did more than the person asked it to do, Amodei said. While it’s a less resource-intensive model, it still performs well, he said.

«It actually does just as well as Opus on some of the coding benchmarks, but I think it’s leaner and more narrowly focused,» Amodei said.

Anthropic said the models have a new capability, still being beta tested, in which they can use tools like web searches while engaged in extended reasoning. The models can alternate between reasoning and using tools to get better responses to complex queries.

The models both offer near-instant response modes and extended thinking modes.

All of the paid plans offer both Opus and Sonnet models, while the free plan just has the Sonnet model.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for May 23, #446

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle No. 446 for May 23.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle has a humorous title, and if you understand the reference, you’ll know what words to look for. If you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: The musical fruit

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: There are magical ones in fairy tales.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints, but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

REEK, GADS, PLAY, PLAYS, PITA, DIAL, FALL, PALL, PALLS, FALLS, GENIE, BEEN, LACK, DENY, NILL.

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you’ve got all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

FAVA, NAVY, BLACK, GREEN, PINTO, KIDNEY, CANNELLINI

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is BEANSALAD. To find it, start with the B that’s three letters to the right on the top row, and wind down.

Technologies

The Marvel Rivals Auto Battler Is a Natural Evolution of Hero Shooters

Move over Teamfight Tactics. Marvel Rivals’ new limited-time mode is the perfect addition to the auto battler genre.

Marvel Rivals has been a breath of fresh air for the hero shooter genre, combining popular comic book characters and chaotic third-person shooter action to create epic team fights that keep me coming back for more.

Fast-paced combat is the name of the game in Marvel Rivals, which is why it could come across as a confusing development that the next limited-time mode launching in Marvel Rivals Season 2.5 is a form of auto battler (also frequently referred to as auto chess).

Ultron’s Battle Matrix Protocol is an experimental mode launching on June 6, where six players will draft teams of heroes to go head to head with their opponents’ drafts. You’ll be able to support your AI teams while the new hero Ultron (also debuting in season 2.5) is chipping in extra healing and damage to the fight.

Aside from the fact that it’ll be cool to stage your own version of Marvel Comics’ Secret Wars, is the decision to add an auto battler to Marvel Rivals (which has previously released limited-time modes that mostly tracked with the shooter’s core gameplay loop) really all that far out of left field? I don’t think so.

Why is Marvel Rivals getting an auto battler mode?

The new mode is similar to multiplayer online battle arena spinoffs such as Dota Auto Chess and League of Legends’ Teamfight Tactics. I think drawing the line from a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) to auto battler is easy for most people.

MOBAs are strategy games first and foremost, where players pick and choose items to craft builds that will help them win their lane, while also contributing to big team fights. Players need to work together to overwhelm the other team and push them back to their spawn.

MOBAs and auto battlers are both about team synergy, positioning and picking the right upgrades, so it’s not surprising to people when characters from a game in one of these genres appear in another.

There are many people that wouldn’t associate hero shooters with MOBAs in the slightest. Games like Marvel Rivals have a high ceiling for very different mechanical skills — especially aiming. But hero shooters are also complex strategy games that share many of the same fundamentals as a MOBA.

Putting together a viable team composition with strong character is the most important part of a hero shooter — and Marvel Rivals takes this to another level with the strongest team-up abilities that require multiple heroes to activate.

An auto battler will allow people to experiment team compositions that don’t often get played in real Marvel Rivals’ matches, and could even help the community find new experimental hero combinations that have the potential to shake up common ways people play the game.

In Ultron’s Battle Matrix Protocol, as the auto battler mode is called, players will be able to put together balanced teams, lock in the risky GATOR strategy (which is nightmarishly similar to Overwatch’s GOATS meta) or fall back on triple support with brand new upgrades that change how the game works.

Absurd power scaling might look like Overwatch 2’s Stadium mode

There’s a clear rivalry between Overwatch 2 and Marvel Rivals, since they’re the two biggest hero shooters on the market right now. Blizzard’s hero shooter is entering its ninth year of life with flagging interest, but its solid fundamentals have been a high bar for Marvel Rivals to hurdle.

Both games have been trying out bold new things — Overwatch 2 recently shipped the MOBA-like Stadium mode that lets players augment popular abilities and take powerful passives as they fight in a flurry of different objectives in a best of seven gauntlet.

Ultron’s Battle Matrix Protocol in some ways feels like NetEase’s response to Blizzard’s big success with Stadium mode. You might not have quite as much influence on the outcome of each battle, but this serves as a proof of concept for Marvel Rivals’ hero power scaling.

This new mode also lets players pick passive abilities that buff certain roles as well as more powerful hero-specific upgrades that drastically alter the course of a fight, so the snowballing power of a Stadium match is very much emulated here.

In the Season 2.5 developer vision video, we got a look at what some of the upgrades will look like.

Venom can grow into a hulking monster after devouring enemies with his ultimate ability, Hela cuts a swath through the playing field with a field of flying daggers, Psylocke zips around her ultimate ability’s area of effect at twice her normal speed and Namor summons many more squid turrets to attack his enemies.

It’s safe to assume that every character in the game will have some kind of special power unlocked in the later rounds of an Ultron’s Battle Matrix Protocol match. This definitely isn’t NetEase reheating Blizzard’s nachos, but I do think it’s indicative of a broader shift toward making hero shooters feel a little bit more chaotic and unrestrained.

Game balance is important, but one of the biggest draws of this genre is that each character is a unique power fantasy you can’t find elsewhere. I can’t imagine such in-depth upgrades were designed for a one-and-done mode, so it’ll be interesting to see where they might show up next.