Public perception of zoom/security is "beyond horrible", thus visibly spending lots of money on an acquisition of a very well respected name in security helps them polish that image at least a little.
And who knows, maybe they'll even work on actually improving security. Always the hopeless romantic/optimist, me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'd say you overestimate that. Perhaps 0.01% of the public knows that Keybase exists and has a bad opinion of Zoom security. Expert's opinion is important, but does not automatically become general perception.
(Anecdatum, I'm far from a security expert. I know that Keybase exists, even have an unused account; I use Zoom for work and don't blame them for not locking up tighter. Their blog post on the topic sounded reasonable to me.)
This is true, but perhaps a bit short-sighted. Expert opinion on Zoom is "avoid it like the plague". This does not automatically become general perception, true, but:
- Over time, expert opinions have a marked effect on adoption by non-experts in their vicinity. See the adoption of Firefox, or Google Chrome, for example.
- For a social networking platform, powerful well-connected never-adopters can pose a problem both to growth and to a budding monopoly. If CIOs and CISOs say, "Zoom over my dead body", that will tend to discourage adoption and encourage development of good alternatives.