The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a lot of people to work from home and attend their classes at home. This also began an unsettling trend of zoom-bombing as hackers and pranksters crashed into virtual meetings with explicit images and abusive messages.
Now, Zoom has agreed to a historic payout of $85 million as part of a class-action settlement brought by its users, including church groups who said that they were left traumatized by the disturbing images and messages.
Zoom Agrees to Settle Lawsuit
As part of the lawsuit settlement agreement, Zoom Video Communications, the company behind the teleconference application that grew popular in 2020 during the peak of the pandemic, will pay the $85 million to users in cash compensation and also implement reforms to its business practices.
On Apr. 21, federal judge Laurel Beeler of California granted final approval to the agreement, which was first filed in July 2021. The agreement was granted preliminary approval in October 2021, according to The Guardian.
Also Read: Zoom Settles Privacy Lawsuit in California for $85 Million
The settlement comes from 14 class-action complaints filed against Zoom by users between March 2020 to May 2020, in which they argued that the company violated their security and privacy.
In one incident in 2020, the Saint Paulus Lutheran Church in San Francisco hosted a bible study class in which most of the participants were senior citizens.
However, shortly into the online session, Zoom "allowed" a known offender to Zoombomb, the class, according to a federal lawsuit that was filed in May 2020, according to Bloomberg.
Incidents of Zoom-bombing
According to the lawsuit, the bible study participants had their computer screens hijacked and their control buttons disabled while being forced to watch pornographic video footage, including images of child sex abuse and physical abuse.
The host was unable to remove the offender from the meeting room and asked the participants to leave instead and just rejoin the session, only for the offender to bombard the meeting again with more graphic content.
According to the lawsuit, the incident left the host and the participants "traumatized and helpless."
In another incident in April 2020, participants who joined the virtual Sunday services at Oakland's Oak Life Church through Zoom were bombarded with child sex abuse images.
According to court documents reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, the participants from the meeting, many of whom were trauma survivors, to begin with, were left devastated and traumatized.
The documents added that Oak Life Church was required to hire a trauma counselor and establish support groups to assist its congregation in dealing with the resulting trauma.
Aside from failing to prevent Zoombombings, the case's plaintiffs have accused Zoom of unlawfully sharing data with authorized third parties such as Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn and misrepresenting the strengths of its end-to-end encryption protocols.
Mark Molumphy, one of the attorneys representing Zoom in the lawsuit, described the settlement as groundbreaking in a statement, adding that it would also implement privacy practices that will help ensure that users are safe and protected.
According to Molumphy, paying users who submit claims will be eligible for 30% of the subscription payment they made during the class period, and other Zoom users will each get about $29.
There are around 150 million settlement class members, including paying and non-paying users, and the compensation amounts may change depending on how many claims are submitted.
Related Article: Zoom Lawsuit Settlement for 'zoombombing,' Privacy Issues; Public to Get as Much as $15
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Written by Sophie Webster
