Zoom’s Trust and Security teams have long worked on investigating all reports of abuse and damage on the platform and developing new ways to stop abuse before it happens. As the customer base of Zoom expanded after the COVID-19 pandemic, so did the use cases of companies that transform and modernize their services such as schools, businesses, healthcare installations, through the technologies of the unified communication platform. This has brought new demands for Trust and Safety teams as well, and Zoom has realigned its services to protect its new customer base, which includes children learning online globally. The company responded to expectations by hiring experienced and determined team members and adapting its processes to new demands on the platform. You can find the details of these studies below.
Response to abuse reports
Zoom has scaled abuse reports and operations to create a multi-layered systematic approach to report processing, where different report types are prioritized. The new system includes a simplified dashboard application that collects reports in one place, displays all the information needed to make quick decisions, and generates meaningful data to learn and improve processes. There is also a dedicated National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) API that allows to report instances of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) directly to NCMEC through this dashboard.
Change in internal policies
Zoom regularly reviews and updates its platform policies and designs new processes to best meet the needs of its users. In addition to responding to CSAM reports, these updates include action taken on meeting interruptions, suicide and self-harm, abuse, violent crimes and more.
Community Standards and reporting features
In October 2020, Zoom published a guide called Community Standards, which contains the behavioral standards it expects from all its users. To provide transparency on how these standards are applied, it has produced the Community Standards Implementation Report, which outlines the issues and violations addressed and resolved in specific countries over a period of time.
Tools designed to keep children safe online
Zoom teams work hard to create solutions with their users in mind. One of the results of these studies is the ‘feedback loop’ implemented by the Trust and Security unit and the engineering department. While innovations in Zoom were implemented based on consumer feedback, many recent steps, especially in security, were realized with the contributions of this department.
Some of the features designed to help keep users safe online and make life easier especially in online education are as follows:
Meeting at Risk Notifier: This feature that runs on Zoom servers and constantly scans posts on social media and other sites Thanks to this, problems related to meeting privacy can be detected. When the system detects a meeting that is at risk of confidentiality as a result of its research and scans, it notifies the organizers via e-mail. Zoom has sent more than 100,000 emails since September 2020 when it announced this feature.
Approve or block the login of users from certain regions/countries: This feature allows hosts to block attendees from certain geographic regions from joining a meeting. Thus, only interested students can join a virtual classroom. It’s a known situation where people who aren’t usually from the same region as the account holder interrupt meetings.
Waiting Room Chat: This feature is another important innovation to ensure the privacy and security of Zoom meetings. The waiting room allows the host to choose who can connect to the meeting. In this way, intruders can be kept out. Participants can also interact with hosts in the Waiting Room. Hosts can send messages to anyone in the Waiting Room or specific attendees and receive responses from them.
Report abuse: If a user is interrupting a meeting or training in the virtual classroom, Zoom offers users multiple ways to report abuse. Hosts can report this abuse from within that meeting by tapping “Participants” in the meeting controls, selecting the name of the participant they want to report, and then selecting “Remove and Report”. The participant is then immediately removed from the meeting. The host is then expected to fill out a quick form explaining the incident. Attendees can also report other attendees via the meeting information icon in the upper left corner of the window.
Suspending Participant Activities:
Zoom collaborates with many organizations dedicated to protecting children
Besides all this, Zoom has collaborations with many organizations dedicated to the safety of children. These organizations, including the Internet Monitoring Foundation, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the WeProtect Global Alliance, Young Leaders for Active Citizenship (YLAC), are among the best practices of the unified communication platform so that children using Zoom can have a safe experience. helps to define and implement it.
These institutions, together with technology providers such as Zoom, play an important role in protecting children in our increasingly digital age. As Zoom, virtual environment, and education integration continue to evolve, tackling challenges across the ecosystem to make the internet a safer and better place for everyone continues to work.
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