Zoom's 15 minutes are just about up

Also: It's April Fool's Day: Are you 🗓 or ❌?

Today should have been a celebration for Zoom Video Communications: use of the company’s product hit a record 4.84 million users this week, overtaking numbers for rivals Microsoft Teams and media darling Slack. Shares of the company’s stock (ZM), which debuted last year at $36, closed on Tuesday at $146; and the company’s market cap more than doubled since late January.

Instead, the company is under broad attack for deceptive product claims, lax security, deceptive data policies, shady installations, and myriad and sundry other actionable offenses (and they don’t seem to be ending).

The response to the revelations has been swift and severe:

• New York’s Attorney General sent a letter questioning the company’s security practices

• The FBI warned schools and businesses against using the service and launched an investigation into episodes involving pornography being shown to schoolchildren participating in online classes

• Two lawsuits now seek substantial damages — a privacy suit citing the company’s failure to protect user data, and a class-action suit damning the company’s unauthorized sale of data to Facebook (which the company now admits)

Not surprisingly, the company’s stock is sliding, and its founder is issuing public mea culpas in an attempt to slow the damage. Many point to the forensic work of the creator of Ruby on Rails — who’s also the Basecamp founder and CTO — for the speed of the blowback, with this thread in particular appearing to trigger the stock slide.

He remains non-plussed:

DHH @dhh

And there’s no assumption of bad faith. There’s a PATTERN of bad faith! The trust battery has been drained to zero by all the specific, nasty choices that Zoom made in their product. The only way to recharge is to make better, different choices.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch and others are writing epitaphs…

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TODAY IN…

DEEP TECH:

• Just days after announcing a pullback from funding facial recognition startups, Microsoft is hailing new legislation in Washington State that “for the first time puts guardrails in place for the use of facial recognition technology”

• Xerox dropped its hostile takeover bid for HP

MEDIA & TELECOM:

• The Sprint/T-Mobile merger is complete (and here’s a look back at the saga)

• A new report vouches for TikTok’s wild growth

• Podcast audiences are plunging:

HEALTHCARE TECH:

• Senators pressed Google’s Verily unit on how the company will protect user data collected via its Covid19 web site. The questions follow separate letters two weeks ago to Google and the Trump administration on the issue

• Major drug makers are under pressure to share patents to combat Covid19

FINANCE:

• The reckoning: Moody’s cuts outlook on $6.6 trillion U.S. corporate debt pile to ‘negative’ … See also: More than $340 billion in new bank loans went to corporations in one week last month — that’s twice the volume of an average year

• Morgan Stanley sees the U.S. deficit reaching $3.7 trillion or more in calender 2020, and says it will add an additional $3 trillion in 2021. If the economy shrinks this year, that means the fiscal deficit could approach 15% to 20% of the overall economy

PUBLIC POLICY:

• Huawei’s new phone includes parts from U.S. manufacturers, despite its blacklisting by the U.S. government … See also: Huawei Technologies chairman threatens retaliation from Beijing if the U.S. cuts off Huawei’s access to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s largest contract chip maker

• Novartis walks

• Smart folks are offering early thoughts on how Covid19 will reshape cities … See also: The U.S. president just called for a massive infrastructure spending bill:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

With interest rates for the United States being at ZERO, this is the time to do our decades long awaited Infrastructure Bill. It should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Trillion Dollars, and be focused solely on jobs and rebuilding the once great infrastructure of our Country! Phase 4

And finally… Add the Girl Scouts to organizations who’ve relented about online sales amid Covid19 restrictions: