why i won't attend your zoom meeting

i wrote this as a quick explainer for members of the reed college community to explain why zoom is bad and we should use different software. i've posted it publicly in hopes that other people will find it useful in convincing their boss, professor, teacher, community, government, etc. to find a better alternative.

zoom is harmful software produced by a malicious and incompetent company:

• zoom lied to users, claiming their software had strong privacy guarantees than it does, for years. only when coming under massive scrutiny due to increased usage during the pandemic has zoom changed its tune and built real privacy protections into their software. it should be noted that even after aceding to public pressure to do so that zoom dragged its feet on making data privacy available to all users.
• zoom collaborates with human right violators to suppress dissent from human rights groups, both in and outside the violators' borders.
• zoom has a long and storied history of bad security vulnerabilities in their software. i can only guess, but i'd imagine security comes second to features and performance for zoom.
• zoom is non-libre/free software. among other problems, this means that the people who use this software cannot easily assess how it works: what information it sends to zoom the company or to any other party; what information it collects; what commands it runs on their computer; etc.
• zoom effectively forces users to install their software on their computer. while zoom does have a web client, it is gated behind a super annoying captcha, even when logged in to a user account. i suspect the motive for this is to drive up the "total number of installations" metric to boost market value-relevant install-base metrics.

there are alternatives:

• jisti is a libre/free alternative to zoom developed in the open. jisti has offered end-to-end encryption longer than zoom. jitsi has roughly the same performance as zoom for reasonably sized meetings (up to ~50 attendees.) jitsi is more convenient than zoom: jitsi's web-client doesn't nag you to install desktop software on your computer through unnecessary captchas. you can operate jitsi on your own server with no need to trust a third-party deployment of its source code. that said, there is a free hosted solution called JitsiMeet.
• webex is a proprietary alternative to zoom. i'm told that it scales better than jitsi, offering comparable performance to zoom for very large meetings, but otherwise i don't know much about it. i can't really recommend it because of the licensing and closed development model.