Zoom fake E2EE — 60s explainer (E06)

01 / 08 · Setup

MARCH 2020. PANDEMIC.

Zoom every day · 300M participants

02 / 08 · Tension

E2E ENCRYPTION? NO.

marketed for years

03 / 08 · Reveal

CITIZEN LAB

Bill Marczak · April 2020 · traffic analysis

04 / 08 · Mechanism

EU user → Bay Area → Beijing server under load

EU/US user

meeting

05 / 08 · Scale

300M PARTICIPANTS DAILY. 500M ACCOUNTS.

2019 E2EE marketing Mar 2020 pandemic Jul 2021 settlement

300M

participants/day

$85M

settlement

May 2020

real E2EE

06 / 08 · Disclosure

APRIL 2020

Citizen Lab

Bill Marczak

The Intercept

Micah Lee · Yael Grauer

Matthew Green

Johns Hopkins

encryption keys generated by Zoom, not participants

07 / 08 · Settlement

$85M

class action In re Zoom Video Communications · July 2021

+ FTC settlement: real E2EE shipped May 2020 (Zoom 5.0). Ban on false advertising. Lesson: marketing ≠ engineering.

08 / 08

ZOOM

E2EE was a marketing word before it became a feature. The pandemic exposed the gap.
File E06 in Big Tech Files.