Supreme Court notice to Centre on plea for banning Zoom app over cybersecurity concerns

The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice to the Centre in a PIL seeking a ban on Zoom App for official and personal purposes by the public until appropriate legislation was put in place to ensure adequate cybersecurity.

A bench of Chief Justice S A Bobde and Justices A S Bopanna and Hrishikesh Roy asked the Union government to respond to the petition filed by a homemaker and a part-time tutor, Harsh Chugh, within four weeks.

In her plea, she 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 claimed 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 for 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.

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 cybersecurity. It was also routing traffic through China, where the internet was heavily monitored by the government.

Still, the Union government has not taken any steps to protect the general public and has not banned the offending software, though it was violative of rights to privacy, she pointed out.

The continued use of this App was only making the users vulnerable and prone to cyber threats.

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.

"There have been concerns about what now is being called ‘zoombombing’ where an unauthorized person or stranger joins a Zoom meeting/chat session and causes disorder by saying offensive things and even photobombing the meeting by sharing pornographic and/or hate images," her plea claimed.

On April 12, 2020, The Cyber Coordination Committee of the Ministry of Home Affairs also issued a public advisory as to how this app was unsafe and laid out certain steps to take care of while using the said app. The subsequent advisory stated that the platform was not for use by government officers for official purposes.

Besides, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), India’s nodal cybersecurity, agency, has also warned Zoom users of cyber risks and that the Zoom app is prone to cyber-attacks, her plea stated.