The Washigtnon Post - 03.04.2020

a1 6 ez re the washington post.friday, april 3 , 2020

Economy & Business

commodities

Food prices decline

in economic downturn

The global economic
slowdown is causing the biggest
drop in food prices since 2015.
The FAO Food Price Index fell
4.3 percent in March, the United
Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization said Thursday. The
biggest declines were in sugar
and vegetable oils. Rice, a staple
for millions of people in Asia,
has risen for the past three
months.
The main reason for the drop
in the index was the plunge in
crude oil, which has taken a hit
from flight cancellations, cities
on lockdown and a price war
between Saudi Arabia and
Russia. Many crops — like sugar,
corn and vegetable oils — are
processed into biofuels and have
followed petroleum markets
lower.
However, food prices don’t
move uniformly around the
world. The cost of wheat or rice
is politically sensitive in many
developing countries. In some
countries, those key
commodities have started to rise.
“The price drops are largely

driven by demand,” s aid FAO

Senior Economist Abdolreza

Abbassian. “The demand factors

are influenced by ever-more

deteriorating economic

prospects.”

The FAO said it’s closely

monitoring prices and logistical

issues for any supply-chain

disruptions. Its index works as

an indicator of potential food

security concerns for developing

countries, where food makes up

a bigger share of overall

household budgets.

While the coronavirus has had

a limited impact on global food

markets, it could pose a “serious

threat” f or some regions, the

FAO’s Agricultural Market

Information System said.

— Bloomberg News

regulation

FTC moves to stop

Altria-Juul alliance

U.S. business regulators are

suing to break up the

multibillion-dollar deal between

tobacco giant Altria and

e -cigarette start-up Juul Labs,

saying their partnership

amounted to an agreement not

to compete in the U.S. vaping

market.

The action announced late

Wednesday by the Federal Trade

Commission is the latest legal

head wind against Altria’s

investment in the embattled

vaping company. Juul sales have

been sliding for months amid

state and federal investigations,

lawsuits and flavor restrictions

aimed at curbing the recent

explosion in teen vaping.

For years, Altria competed in

the burgeoning e-cigarette space.

But the Richmond-based

company was quickly overtaken

by San Francisco-based Juul,

which became the top U.S.

vaping brand on the popularity

of its small, high-nicotine and

fruity-flavored e-cigarettes. The

company has since pulled all of

its flavors except tobacco and

menthol.

In late 2018, Altria

discontinued its own e-cigarettes

and took a 35 percent stake in

Juul.

The complaint announced by

the FTC alleges that Altria

agreed not to compete against

Juul in return for the $13 billion

stake in the company.

Altria said in a statement that

the FTC “misunderstood the

facts” of its investment in Juul.

Juul did not immediately

respond to requests for

comment Thursday.

— Associated Press

also in Business

Netflix led rivals YouTube,

Amazon Prime and Disney Plus

with over 59 million installs in

the first quarter of 2020, but

more time was spent on

YouTube’s Kids service as usage

boomed following the shutdown

of thousands of schools in

March, according to a report by

analytics firms Apptopia and

Braze. The report did not give

actual hours of usage, but it

ranked YouTube Kids first,

followed by Netflix. YouTube

itself was in third place.

Twitter took down thousands of

accounts linked to Egypt,

Honduras, Indonesia, Saudi

Arabia and Serbia on Thursday

for either taking directions from

the governments or promoting

pro-government content. Twitter

said it removed the accounts

because they violated its policies

and attempted to undermine the

public conversation.

Fiat Chrysler aims to restart

operations at three Italian sites

as soon as the government lifts

coronavirus restrictions on

manufacturing, a union

representative said Thursday,

adding that unions would

monitor health precautions.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte

said a national lockdown would

be extended until at least April

13.

coming today

8:3 0 a.m.: Labor Department

releases employment data for

March.

— From news services

digest

yonhap/epa-eFe/shutterstock

Workers harvest the first green tea crop of the season at a farm in

Seogwipo, South Korea, on Thursday. The farm sits on Jeju Island, a

tourist destination a bout 280 miles south of Seoul on the Korean

Peninsula, and is home to several UNESCO World Heritage sites.

BY DREW HARWELL

When Georgetown University
began advising its faculty to use
the video-call service Zoom to re-
cord classes during the coronavi-
rus lockdowns, professor James
Millward couldn’t help worrying
about where all that video would
end u p.
His course on modern China
features free-flowing and unspar-
ing discussions a bout contentious
issues s uch as censorship and sur-
veillance. How would students’
privacy be protected? And could
video of s tudents’ f aces, v oices a nd
questions someday be used
against t hem?
“If we had a big camera on the
wall recording everything hap-
pening in our normal classrooms,
we would be very a larmed by that,”
he said in an interview. “A nd yet
we’re now eagerly setting that all
up in our homes, creating these
recordings without having any
idea w hat’s happening to them.”
After the coronavirus conta-
gion brought an end to many of
the rituals of everyday life, many
of them reappeared on Zoom, a
video-call service that has explod-
ed in popularity across a nation
almost entirely locked indoors.
Weddings, funerals, company lay-
offs, k indergarten classes and offi-
cial government meetings have
been streamed on its platform,
leading the Silicon Valley firm’s
market value to double to roughly
$35 billion this y ear.
But in the dramatic growth in
demand for its product, the com-
pany has encountered a crisis o f its
own: concerns over issues o f secu-
rity, privacy and harassment that
could leave its growing audience
at risk. Security researchers who
have analyzed Zoom’s program-
ming code say its software relies
on techniques that could leave
people’s computers exposed to
breaches. And its data-sharing ar-
rangements and the ability of
some users to record conversa-
tions without the consent of all
parties involved in those conver-
sations could undermine people’s
privacy a s they engage in sensitive
discussions from h ome.
Zoom was launched as a busi-
ness-friendly video chat, and the
company’s engineers pushed de-
sign decisions that bypassed cer-
tain safeguards to save people a
few clicks before making or join-
ing calls. But technical experts
argue the shortcuts are a vulnera-
bility open hackers who could ex-
ploit them to snoop on people’s
lives.
The company in recent d ays has
endured a storm of embarrassing
revelations from security re-
searchers pointing out flaws that
could allow strangers to steal log-
in information, gain access to
messages and take control of us-
ers’ cameras and microphones.
Zoom chief executive Eric Yuan
said in a blog post Wednesday
night that he was “deeply sorry”
for falling short of users’ “privacy
and s ecurity e xpectations.”
“We did not design the product
with the foresight that, in a matter
of weeks, every person in the
world would suddenly be work-

ing, studying, and socializing

from home,” he wrote. The sys-

tem’s new user base, he said, was

using Zoom in a number of “unex-

pected ways, presenting us with

challenges we did not anticipate

when the platform was con-

ceived.”

The company, Yuan said, will

freeze work on new features and

shift all of i ts e ngineering resourc-

es for the next 90 days to its big-

gest safety and privacy shortfalls.

The company is also gathering a

team of o utside experts to conduct

a “comprehensive review” of the

system and draw up a short-term

battle plan.

Zoom also is removing some

controversial features, including

an “attention-tracking” option

that allowed a host to be alerted

when the system suspected a call

participant was looking else-

where.

Federal and state authorities

have begun asking questions

about how the software monitors

and protects Americans’ video

streams. New York Attorney Gen-

eral Letitia James (D) has asked

the company for details on how

user data is shared and s afeguard-

ed, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal

(D-Conn.) wrote a letter to Yuan

on Tuesday demanding answers

about the company’s “troubling

history of software design practic-

es and security lapses.”

Zoom has also attracted the

scrutiny o f the F BI, which s aid this

week that it had received multiple

reports o f Zoom’s a nd other video-

conference calls disrupted by

anonymous trolls posting porno-

graphic images and issuing

threats; in one case last month, a

hijacker on Z oom shouted a t each-

er’s h ome address in t he m iddle of

class.

Some have also criticized

Zoom’s default settings, which al-

low a video host to record the call

without participants’ explicit con-

sent. Call participants a re notified

when the recording starts and are

given the option of leaving, but

some students and other Zoom

users said they feel they have to

stay.

Alex Stamos, the former Face-

book security chief who leads the

Stanford Internet Observatory,

said Zoom’s p roblems have ranged

from silly design decisions to seri-

ous product-security flaws —

many of which he is reminded of

constantly, because he, his wife

and their three school-age chil-

dren now use Zoom a t home every

day.

“Google would never ship with

these problems. Never. They can

afford the best s ecurity team i n the

world,” he said. “But in a competi-

tive marketplace, what you also

have to put up with is security

growing pains from the upstarts.”

Zoom has become a global phe-

nomenon virtually overnight be-

cause its video-call software is rel-

atively fast, reliable and easy to

use. Though Zoom’s business cli-

ents pay thousands of dollars a

month for service, anyone can use

it to conduct free video calls or

group meetings of up to 40 min-

utes duration. During the corona-

virus pandemic, the company also

is allowing grade schools to use

the p latform free of charge.

Zoom was used by more than

200 million callers last month, up

from 10 million in December, and

is used in more than 90,

schools across 20 countries, Yuan

said. More than 5 million people in

the U nited States u sed Zoom’s m o-

bile apps on Tuesday, five times

more than a month a go.

Yuan, Zoom’s billionaire found-

er, said he first daydreamed about

a snappy video-chat service when

he was a college student in China

during long train rides to visit his

girlfriend (now his wife). He

moved to Silicon Valley during the

late 1990s tech boom, joining the

rival video firm WebEx, and later

left with a team of engineers to

found Z oom in 2 011.

The San Jose-based company

made the bulk of its $188 million

in revenue during the past fiscal

year, which ended Jan. 31, from

video-service subscriptions sold

to more than 80,000 businesses,

financial filings show.

That is part of the problem,

some industry experts said: Zoom

was never designed for house-

holds, schools and social groups

unsure of the advanced settings

and technical controls. The ser-

vice’s sudden popularity was so

unexpected that Yuan told a virtu-

al summit on Wednesday that the

shift from a professional clientele

to a mainstream audience was t he

company’s “number one chal-

lenge.”

Zoom faced h eavy criticism l ast

summer when a security research-

er showed the company had been

installing secret p ieces of software

on users’ computers that could

turn on their cameras without

their knowledge or consent. The

company d efended the practice a s

helping speed up meetings, but

groups such as the Electronic Pri-

vacy Information Center, which

filed a complaint with the Federal

Trade Commission, said the cam-

era-control capability ignored se-

curity settings and could be

abused by strangers wanting to

silently invade Zoom users’ calls.

After Zoom said it corrected the

issue, engineers at Apple took the

rare step of universally deleting

the programs. Zoom said it no

longer uses the technique.

But as the app’s popularity has

grown, researchers have revealed

new concerns. Zoom’s iPhone and

iPad apps sent some limited infor-

mation, such as users’ location

cities and the time at which they

opened the app, to Facebook as

part of a log-in feature common

across the Web. After the tech

outlet Motherboard revealed the

practice, Zoom said it removed the

relevant code.

Zoom advertised a security

measure, known as e nd-to-end en-

cryption, that would protect mes-

sages between senders and their

designated recipients. But an

analysis in the online outlet the

Intercept this week showed that

the messages are not properly en-

crypted, potentially allowing out-

siders to s ee their contents.

Security researchers this week

said software vulnerabilities also

could allow hackers to gain access

to users’ cameras and micro-

phones. Zoom representatives

said they are “actively investigat-

ing” the reports. And the code

Zoom uses to s peed u p installation

relies on “bad security practices

and... lying to the user,” accord-

ing to a technical analyst at the

cybersecurity firm VMRay. Yuan,

Zoom’s CEO, said in a response

that the company had used those

practices to “balance the number

of clicks” r equired b y a user b efore

the p rogram c ould be u sed.

The country’s abrupt Zoom-ifi-

cation also has elevated anxieties

among some bosses and teachers

scrambling to lead employees and

students in a strange new time.

New York University Provost

Katherine Fleming sent the uni-

versity’s teaching staff an email

last month t rying to address some

concerns.

“Holding classes remotely is n ot

a secret first step on the road to

eliminating our regular mode of

instruction,” Fleming wrote, ac-

cording to a copy of the email

provided to The Washington Post.

“NYU is not using NYU Zoom to

surveil your c lass.”

Clay Shirky, a vice provost for

educational technologies at NYU,

said Zoom has helped the univer-

sity rescue the semester from dev-

astating cancellations: At any mo-

ment during the school day, more

than 250 classes are in session on

Zoom. But the company, he said,

has often “shot themselves in the

foot by doing some dopey market-

ing,” such as offering the “atten-

tion-tracking” feature, which

alerted a video host when an at-

tendee had clicked out of the

Zoom window f or more than half a

minute.

Zoom removed the feature, but

the d amage in s ome ways has been

done. “In this climate of anxiety,”

Shirky said, “it is very easy for

some tiny irritant to become a

pearl o f uproar.”

Zoom has scrambled to navi-

gate the criticism, rolling out

guides for how users can better

protect their video streams. Over

the weekend, the company also

updated its privacy policy to say

that customer v ideo and c hat mes-

sages a re not accessed by the c om-

pany or u sed for advertising. “Your

meetings are yours. We do not

monitor them or even store them

after y our meeting i s done” e xcept

at the host’s request, Zoom’s chief

legal officer, Aparna Bawa, wrote.

But there is already some indi-

cation that t he pushback has start-

ed weighing down Zoom’s bottom

line: The company’s stock price,

which initially soared during the

coronavirus l ockdowns, h as fallen

this week nearly 25 percent. At

least two class-action lawsuits

were filed against Zoom this week

alleging that the company had

improperly s hared u sers’ personal

information and had duped cus-

tomers with its promise of en-

crypted c hat.

[email protected]

Everybody seems to be using Zoom, but at what risk?

The sudden popularity of the chat service exposes security flaws and draws condemnation, sending its parent company into damage-control mode

Dylan Martinez/reuters

Alice Dunhill sips a glass of wine in her home studio in London as she catches up with friends using Zoom while the spread of the novel

coronavirus continues. Zoom’s chief executive said t he company d id not anticipate the quick onset of h eavy global use of its platform.

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