Zoom updates iOS app with fix for Facebook data collecting bug

Zoom acknowledged that the Facebook login feature was indeed sending unnecessary data to the social platform.

Video conferencing app Zoom became immensely popular as many people started working from and students moved to online classes. (Zoom)

Zoom is one app that gained immense traction with many people working from home and students taking online classes. The video conferencing app was however found sending data to Facebook even for users who don't have an account on the social platform. Zoom has now removed the feature that allowed sending such data to Facebook.

According to a report by Motherboard, Zoom's iOS app was sending data to Facebook through the "Login with Facebook" feature. Users who login through Facebook on Zoom will have some of its profile information sent to the social platform which Zoom has already made a disclaimer of. But the investigation found that this was happening for non-Facebook users as well.

Zoom later confirmed that the Facebook SDK feature was indeed collecting data from users.

"The data collected by the Facebook SDK did not include any personal user information, but rather included data about users' devices such as the mobile OS type and version, the device time zone, device OS, device model and carrier, screen size, processor cores, and disk space," Motherboard quoted Zoom as saying.

After acknowledging the problem, Zoom rolled out an update to its iOS app which has "Improvements to Facebook Login". The company also said that it is removing the Facebook SDK but reconfiguring it so that Zoom users can still login via Facebook from their browser. Zoom users can update their apps to the latest version for the new changes. But it's most likely best to not use Facebook login for Zoom even though it makes things easier and convenient.