April 5, 2020 – In a letter to FTC Chairman Joe Simons, EPIC urged the FTC to “open an investigation of Zoom’s business practices and to issue, as soon as practicable, Best Practices for Online Conferencing Services.” The EPIC letter followed a 2019 complaint from EPIC warning that Zoom had “placed at risk the privacy and security of the users of its services.”
EPIC also explained to the FTC that Zoom had “exposed users to the risk of remote surveillance, unwanted videocalls, and denial-of-service attack.” In the April 2020 letter to the Commission, EPIC reminded the Commission that it acted on similar complaints from EPIC concerning Facebook and Google but failed to act on the Zoom complaint. EPIC cited widespread reports of privacy and security flaws with the online conferencing service. EPIC wrote, “Now more than ever, the Federal Trade Commission has a responsibility to safeguard American consumers. We urge you to act.”
EPIC is a public interest research center in Washington, DC. EPIC was established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging privacy and civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic values in the information age. www.epic.org