Zoom was used by actual fucking courts to hold actual fucking criminal trials. Like bruh the fucking US judiciary department couldn’t have self-hosted one of the many open source and E2EE solutions?

It should be said that many business customers do use a self-hosted version of Zoom. I couldn’t say for sure if every court did, but major government bodies definitely used something more than the free package, which come with different T&Cs.

Additionally, that also does not address the actual societal/legislative issues of them being allowed to keep that information and use it for profit.

This is the big issue in online user data. In no other instance in life can someone take something without offering anything in return. Yes, websites are usually free, but Microsoft collect your data from the software you already pay them for. Just like you can’t build and sell a car without paying for the nuts and bolts, there needs to be clear legal infrastructure to prevent data businesses from getting away with taking everyone’s data for free and using it to develop products for pure profit.