During the epidemic, teleconferencing systems became increasingly popular, with the more common ones such as Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Google meet, and Microsoft Teams.

Zoom

The Zoom Wikipedia page has a very detailed description of Zoom. According to it, Zoom’s profits have increased by 4000%, while its products are controversial in terms of privacy, security, encryption methods, data transfer, and censorship.

The following is from Wikipedia, click on the link to see more content.

Data routing

Zoom admitted that some calls in early April 2020 and prior were mistakenly routed through servers in mainland China, prompting some governments and businesses to cease their usage of Zoom.[143] The company later announced that data of free users outside of China would “never be routed through China” and that paid subscribers will be able to customize which data center regions they want to use. The company has data centers in Europe, Asia, North America, and Latin America.[144][145]

Censorship

See also: Zoom Video Communications § Censorship, Overseas censorship of Chinese issues, and Internet censorship in China

An April 2020 Citizen Lab report warned that having much of Zoom’s research and development in China could “open up Zoom to pressure from Chinese authorities.”[75] Lee Cheuk Yan’s (Chairman of Hong Kong Labour Party) account was also closed in early May 2020, and human rights activist Zhou Fengsuo’s was closed in June after he held an event discussing the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.[146][147] In June 2020, Zoom acknowledged that it had terminated two accounts belonging to U.S. users and one of a user from Hong Kong connected to meetings discussing 1989 Tiananmen Square protests,[148] the accounts were later re-opened, with the company stating that in the future it “will have a new process for handling similar situations.”[149] Zoom also announced upcoming technology that could prevent participants from specific countries from joining calls that were deemed illegal in those areas.[148]

Zoom zero-day discovery makes calls safer, hackers $200,000 richer this month as new security issues are revealed

User communication data is more or less stored on the servers of video communication service providers, which adds to the risk of customer data being collected and analyzed, while requiring the installation of client software increases the attack surface, which makes the above video software vendors inevitably become a potential source of privacy leaks.

Open-Source Solutions

Due to the open source software model, as an open standard, many people can participate in it and work together to improve its ecology and security. Open source software has good solutions for video communication software, such as Jitsi, which is very popular among non-profit organizations and the open source software community.

It has the following advantages.

• Ease of use: It is easy to get started through a web browser.
• Security: Current web browsers support a technology called sandboxing, which can effectively isolate web applications and avoid the hidden risks of security caused by installing client software.
• Privacy: By self-hosted, the software is installed on a private server, making it impossible for other vendors to collect data.
• Customizability: Logo and home page images and URLs can be customized to meet the requirements of the organization’s unified logo.
• Free to use: Using the software has no cost.
• Self-hosting cost and performance: The cost of the private server starts from $5/month, through the testing by Niagara Linux, the $5 Linux server instance can support about 5-6 people video conference; the $10 Linux server instance can support about 10-12 people.

The cost of ownership is no higher than Zoom and other paid versions of the product and brings many advantages in terms of privacy, security and resistance to censorship.

Reference

Better than Zoom: Try these free software tools for staying in touch