alt Hacker News> If there's one [zoom call] I really need to be on, I'm going to spin up a VM on my computer so that it has no idea of the other files laying around, such as my ~/passcodes.csv`
Oh come now. You don't really think Zoom is exfiltrating unrelated files from your computer, do you? If they got caught doing this, it would be such a major scandal... why risk it? And even though the client is closed-source I do think they'd get caught. It just isn't fathomable to me.
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They wouldn't do it "intentionally". It would be an mistake "accidentally" made by a Developer or AI, that under the right conditions allows Zoom employees, etc arbitrary file reads on the host...
Or just open the call in the browser. It’s much easier to do that than to spin a vm. At this point I just distrust the author
For the average user, you're probably right. In more secure environments, relying on the rational behavior of outside parties for your security isn't tenable.
There's also security vulnerabilities. A while back there was a Firefox bug that let websites upload arbitrary files, which got used to steal SSH keys.