Isn't it fair to say that this brings Zoom more-or-less exactly in line with the privacy vs law enforcement balance of a normal telephone call?

Writing from the UK, I'm reasonably sure that (a) all my phone calls are not recorded and (b) the phone number and duration of every call absolutely is recorded (this has to be shown on your phone bill!) and is available to the police when needed.

Speculating further, with the right court orders / warrants the normal E2E encryption algorithm for a particular user could be replaced with a "law enforcement decryptable" one and, hey presto, it's a Zoom equivalent of a proportionate wiretap that only covers future calls. Certainly a lot better than encrypting the calls of all users with such an algorithm "just in case".

Why on Earth would you trust Zoom, a company which has repeatedly done extremely sketchy things, to implement their closed-source proprietary platform in this specific way?

It would be easier to just lie about the encryption being end-to-end.

Personally, I will never use Zoom for anything, a decision I came to when my OS vendor (Apple) pushed a security update for my OS to get rid of Zoom.

I wasn't really trying to comment on their overall trustworthiness - I just don't think you have to stretch very far to imagine how a conversation between ≥1 Zoom employee who genuinely does care about privacy ("our users are demanding E2EE") and law enforcement agencies ("we demand or are entitled to certain powers") might have resulted in the offering being announced today.

> Writing from the UK, I'm reasonably sure that (a) all my phone calls are not recorded

With 5 / 14 eyes and no specific privacy doctrine in the UK, I have no idea why you would have that assumption at all.

Maybe not recorded indefinitely, but it seems very possible to voice to text and store that forever.

Well to be fair if it was enabled by default it would break dial in (with traditional telephone) support as E2E doesn’t allow for that. This is a reason why even some large paying organisations haven’t enabled E2E

Agreed, to rephrase my concern: By default accounts don’t even have the option to enable E2E encryption in a meeting. There’s no button to press that will turn on encryption if nobody’s dialing in. Your user account has to go through a separate review process to get the “privilege” of encrypting your meeting.

Are they going to use that information for marketing purposes? Free but only if you give them info seems too good to be true.