On April 1 the CEO basically said they messed up and would pause all feature development and focus exclusively on security & privacy for 90 days.[1] They've also done weekly video AMAs that are summarised on their blog under the 90-Day Security Plan posts.[2]
They've made a lot of progress.
The Keybase acquisition is absolutely about helping to build a security team that can help them implement end-to-end encryption across 1000 person meetings. You can see that from this Twitter post[3] from Alex Stamos and this interview[4] with him.
[1] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-u... [2] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/category/announcements/ [3] https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1258405729720918016 [4] https://cheddar.com/media/zoom-acquires-keybase-beefs-up-sec...
Besides upvotes, HN should have a hall of fame for comments this good.
It reminds me of 1 Corinthians 15:33 quoting the Greek poet Menander:
Do not be misled: “Bad company corrupts good character.”Essentially, on some level we never stop the role-model based adaptation we did as children, when we modeled our behavior on what our parent(s) did.
If having a conscience means prioritizing security above all else, then Keybase is doomed.
But security isn’t the only thing that matters. Zoom seems to have focused on making a very user friendly product. Keybase focused on making security more user friendly. In many ways, the user focus of both apps is their Prime selling point.
Perhaps they weren’t buying a conscience, they were fixing a blind spot.
Because no one ever buys or hires a conscience. If you thought a conscience was worth having one, that implies you would already have one and thus wouldn't need to outsource it in the first place.
Ethics always rolls downhill. If Al Capone goes out and hires Mr. Rogers, the power imbalance between them means Mr. Rogers is going to get dirtier than Capone will get clean.