NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday closed a PIL seeking ban on the use of the Zoom application over security and privacy concerns.
A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and M M Sundresh took into record a submission by senior advocate Arvind Datar that the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had found nothing wrong in the usage of the application.
There is nothing wrong in using Zoom why only it should be targetted and not WebEx etc, Datar asked.
The petition was filed by a homemaker and a part-time tutor, Harsh Chugh. She sought ban on Zoom App for official and personal purposes by the public until an appropriate legislation was put in place to ensure adequate cyber security.
During the hearing, the petitioners counsel contended that the government had issued certain notifications that Zoom shouldn't be used. The counsel further said that let the government say that Zoom is good to use.
The bench said it has considered the minutes of the meeting of the National Security Council Secretariat held in December 2020, regarding the security features of Zoom, VC platform, and nothing survived in the petition in view of this document.
In her plea, Chugh claimed that Zoom was reported to have a bug that can be abused intentionally to leak information of users to third parties. The app used for video and audio conferencing, meetings, chats and webinars has falsely claiming calls are end-to-end encrypted when they are not, she said.
The petitioner said during the times when the world was under the shadow of Covid-19 pandemic forcing millions of people to stay home since March 2020, Zoom suddenly became the video meeting service of choice of the people worldwide. The daily meeting participants on the platform surged from 10 million in December, 2019 to 200 million in March 2020 as revealed by the CEO of the app, Eric S Yuan.
However, it is important to realise how Zoom consistently violates its duty to implement and maintain reasonable security practices. There have been reports on how it misled consumers about the security benefits of the product, her plea said.
The CEO of the company has already apologised publically and has accepted the app to be faulty in terms of providing a secure environment digitally which was against the norms of cyber security. It was also routing traffic through China, where the internet was heavily monitored by the government, her plea added.
"Still the Union government has not taken any steps to protect the general public and have not banned the offending software, though it was violative of rights to privacy," the petitioner pointed out.
"The continued use of this App was only making the users vulnerable and prone to cyber threats," the plea said.
Due to various privacy and security concerns, various organisations and governments have banned the use of Zoom App, namely, Australian Defence Force Berkeley, California (public school use), Canada (Federal government use that requires secure communications), Clark County, Nevada (public school use), German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Google, NASA, New York City (public school use), Singapore Ministry of Education, Smart Communications, SpaceX, Taiwan (government use), United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, United States Senate, the petitioner said.
