Can Zoom be trusted with users’ secrets?

FEW AMERICAN companies have done as well during the covid-19 crisis as Zoom. The lifesaver of lockdown joins a small coterie of tech firms whose product, like Google’s, you no longer need to explain to grandmas. Zoom’s staggering success was made clear this month when it reported a 169% surge in year-on-year sales during the three months to April 30th. Daily users ballooned from 10m in December to 300m in April; profits soared alongside. Even analysts, rarely the most expressive of writers, let rip. One report started with “Wow”. Another, with “Holy Cow”.

Zoom’s achievements go beyond mere lucre. Its videoconferencing tools have the intuitive simplicity of an Apple product. It has made working from home feel not clunky, but chic. Moreover, its 50-year-old founder, Eric Yuan, cuts an intriguing figure. He has ridden an emotional roller-coaster this year as his company faced not just adulation, but scathing criticism for privacy lapses, data breaches and Zoom-bombings. Yet the speed with which he acknowledged the setbacks, and rolled out a 90-day plan to fix them, offers a case study of a leader who tries to learn from his mistakes. On June 17th, for instance, Zoom said it was introducing end-to-end encryption for all users.

But Mr Yuan, an American citizen, has a more intractable problem. It concerns his country of birth...