Censored! Zoom’s upcoming feature will allow China to block individual users

Zoom’s upcoming feature will allow it to remove or block users based on geography, the cloud-based video conferencing platform said in a blog post. This is so the company can comply with requests from local authorities to crack down on any illegal activity within their borders. Zoom also said that it will no longer take requests from the Chinese government to impact user accounts outside of mainland China.

Both these developments are concerning actually. On the one end, Zoom has acknowledged that it was open to impacting user accounts outside of mainland China (which means, virtually anybody) at the behest of the Chinese government until very recently, and on the other end, it is now saying out loud that it is open to the idea of a “censored” state which sort of defeats the whole purpose of it also simultaneously working on end-to-end encryption.