Zoom invites Facebook ex-security chief to help with privacy challenges as bans continue to pile up

Despite its immense popularity with businesses, the remote conferencing service and Google Meet rival Zoom has been facing a lot of challenges lately. As we recently reported, it got banned from being used at SpaceX and in public schools in New York, followed by a lawsuit from a company shareholder, to eventually be banned from use even by the US Senate and at Google.

And this is just in the span of last seven days, all due to increasing concerns over Zoom's privacy and security flaws.

In its attempts to regain user trust, Zoom Video Communications has now launched a security advisory council, with ex-Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos appointed as one of its members.

As we've learned from Stamos' Medium post (via 9to5Mac), he was approached by Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan to discuss the company's recent challenges, together with a proper way to assess all the security expectations that came with its success and growth.

Zoom's CEO would eventually invite Stamos to help the company improve in its security and privacy departments as a consultant, to which Stamos agreed. In his post, Stamos makes it clear that he's not a spokesperson for Zoom, nor even an employee, but an outside consultant.

As he previously worked for the world's biggest social network, Facebook, from 2015 to 2018, and having even challenged the NSA over encryption backdoors while working at Yahoo earlier, Stamos seems like the perfect candidate for what Zoom needs right now.

Considering Facebook's own controversies surrounding user privacy, and generally unfavorable user trust, it remains to be seen if Zoom will have more success with tackling its increasing security and privacy-related challenges.

Zoom remains one of the most popular video conferencing apps for businesses, along with Google Meet, Skype for Business and Slack.