Zoom has skyrocketed to 300 million daily users, up 50% from the beginning of April, even as the company battles a privacy backlash (ZM)

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More than 300 million people joined Zoom meetings on April 21, up 50% from the beginning of the month, CEO Eric Yuan said in a webinar Wednesday.
Zoom's surging popularity comes despite numerous privacy scandals that have plagued the company in recent weeks, from "Zoom bombing" to surreptitiously sharing data with Facebook.
Zoom is rolling out several new features this week aimed at fixing those issues, like allowing users to report trolls and offering them more control over their security settings, it announced Wednesday in a blog post.
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More than 300 million people used Zoom's video conferencing software on April 21, a 50% jump from 200 million daily users at the beginning of the month, CEO Eric Yuan said during a webinar Wednesday.

"Clearly, the Zoom platform is providing an incredibly valuable service to our beloved users during this challenging time," Yuan said. "We are thrilled and honored to continue to earn the trust of so many enterprises, hospitals, teachers and customers throughout the world."

As coronavirus lockdowns have encouraged more people to turn to video conferencing tools to keep working as well as stay in touch with friends and family, Zoom has emerged as the dominant platform, topping charts in both Apple and Google's app stores at the end of March.

But Zoom's popularity has skyrocketed in recent weeks even as the company scrambles to address various privacy scandals. In a practice called "Zoom bombing," trolls have been hijacking users' meetings, while the company was for a time sending analytics data to Facebook without alerting users, which prompted a class-action lawsuit before Zoom eventually reversed course.

In a blog post earlier Wednesday, Zoom announced that the new version of its software, set to roll out to users within the week, would have a number of features aimed at fixing some of those issues. Users will soon be able to report trolls who intrude on meetings uninvited, and they'll also be able to take advantage of stronger AES 256-bit GCM encryption. Other changes to default settings around meeting passwords and "waiting rooms" — which help keep uninvited guests out of meetings — are already available to users, the post said.

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