The U.S. video-conferencing company Zoom closed the account of a group of prominent U.S.-based Chinese activists after they held a Zoom event commemorating the 31st anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen Square Massacre Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian https://www.axios.com/zoom-closes-chinese-user-account-tiananmen-square-f218fed1-69af-4bdd-aac4-7eaf67f34084.html
So, China cracks down on citizens who discuss the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Everybody knows China is extremely insane when it comes to monitoring their citizens. For example:
Every citizen in China, which now has numbers swelling to well over 1.3 billion, would be given a score that, as a matter of public record, is available for all to see. This citizen score comes from monitoring an individual’s social behavior — from their spending habits and how regularly they pay bills, to their social interactions — and it’ll become the basis of that person’s trustworthiness, which would also be publicly ranked.
This actually sounds worse than an Orwellian nightmare.
https://futurism.com/china-social-credit-system-rate-human-value
So, China is a raging dictatorship. Nothing new about it. It's horrendous and must be contested at all times, but nothing new.
Zoom, however, is a USA-based company that only exists to accumulate more money for their shareholders. That's their raison d'être.
Any company that exists should be concerned with morals and build a transparent ethical code that they adhere to. As I have written numerous times before, Zoom have behaved more than nefariously; they have, on both technical and business levels, acted shadily, to put it mildly. Read up on what they've done.
Therefore, it should come as a surprise to nobody, that they've now closed a Zoom user account because China asked them to.
This is an excerpt of how Zoom comments on this:
We aim to limit the actions we take to those necessary to comply with local law and continuously review and improve our process on these matters. Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian https://www.axios.com/zoom-closes-chinese-user-account-tiananmen-square-f218fed1-69af-4bdd-aac4-7eaf67f34084.html
As The Citizen Lab correctly predicted April 4, 2020, Zoom could very well just bow down to demands from the Chinese government. This is why:
Zoom, a Silicon Valley-based company, appears to own three companies in China through which at least 700 employees are paid to develop Zoom’s software. This arrangement is ostensibly an effort at labor arbitrage: Zoom can avoid paying US wages while selling to US customers, thus increasing their profit margin. However, this arrangement may make Zoom responsive to pressure from Chinese authorities.https://niklasblog.com/?p=24569
Note: Zoom have not responded to queries of why they have deleted user accounts:
Details: Zhou Fengsuo, founder of the U.S. nonprofit Humanitarian China and former student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, organized the May 31 event held through a paid Zoom account associated with Humanitarian China.
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian https://www.axios.com/zoom-closes-chinese-user-account-tiananmen-square-f218fed1-69af-4bdd-aac4-7eaf67f34084.html
- About 250 people attended the event. Speakers included mothers of students killed during the 1989 crackdown, organizers of Hong Kong's Tiananmen candlelight vigil, and others.
- On June 7th, the Zoom account displayed a message that it had been shut down, in a screenshot viewed by Axios. Zhou has not been able to access the account since then, and Zoom has not responded to his emails, he told Axios.
- A second Zoom account belonging to a pro-democracy activist, Lee Cheuk Yan, a former Hong Kong politician and pro-democracy activist, was also closed in late May. Lee has also received no response from Zoom.
To Zoom: just be decent human beings; you are currently not. This is horrendous.
I would never, ever use Zoom willingly. Just use Jitsi Meet.
Also, if you've missed this:
I just cancelled my @zoom_us subscription for my law firm, which I had recently purchased to assist with doing remote consultations with clients during the COVID-19 lockdown.
— Joel Alan Gaffney (@JagAttorney) June 3, 2020
In other words: Zoom only provide 'encryption' to paying users. I use hyphens because:
- Zoom have lied about adhering to industry standards when they claimed to use end-to-end encryption, which means they might lie about all of this
- Zoom's code is completely closed, which means we cannot validate their encryption claims
Will Zoom Bring Encryption to the People Who Need It Most? | Electronic Frontier Foundation https://t.co/tspyOmpoCW
— Belong.io unofficial (
EFF's and Mozilla's message to Zoom is clear: end-to-end encryption should not be a premium feature. »_io) June 11, 2020
Yaqiu Wang, China researcher for Human Rights Watch said: “Laws in China are often abusive and don’t comply with international human rights standards. Yet tech companies have a responsibility to respect human rights.”
“Tech companies should stand together to resist Beijing’s censorship demands and uphold the right to freedom of expression. Otherwise, the grovelling will never end,” she said.
Helen Davidson https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/12/zoom-admits-cutting-off-activists-accounts-in-obedience-to-china
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://niklasblog.com/?p=24918