In the wake of a record fine for social media giant Meta for transferring European citizens’ data to the United States Big tech companies are starting to make changes to their privacy settings.
Background: The privacy update follows Meta last month being hit with a record €1.2 billion fine (about $1.3 billion) for transferring social media users’ data to the U.S. where the European Union says the data is not adequately protected from the government’s surveillance practices.
The fine was the largest ever issued under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a landmark piece of legislation establishing privacy standards across the European Union and threatening companies with fines of up to 4% of their global turnover if they failed to comply with it.
Zoom has introduced a new range of privacy enhancements and tools to provide their users of better control over their data and their privacy preferences. This changes not only cater to global customers but also include features specifically designed for users in the European Economic Area (EEA).
Zoom is to allow paying customers in the European Economic Area (EEA) to keep their data inside the EEA, only sharing it with U.S. teams “in individual cases and exceptional circumstances, such as with Zoom’s Trust & Safety team.”
Limiting the feature to paying customers is likely to prove contentious for Zoom, which was accused of breaking privacy laws in 2021 by Ulrich Kühn, the acting commissioner for data protection in the German city of Hamburg, for sending on-demand user data to the U.S.
Alongside these features, Zoom said it will allow users to opt out of marketing communications with a single click and will offer “more visibility into Zoom's data retention and deletion policies,” which are also moves taken in compliance with the GDPR.
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