A woman holds a video conference from home. Photo: Li Hao/GT

Using so-called safety issues as an accusation against China has been an irresponsible old-fashion talk by some foreign organizations, which is not based on ration but bias, industry insiders responded to the accusation by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab on Friday, in which they alleged the global technology company Zoom may be legally obligated to disclose encryption keys to Chinese government.

The comment came after a report by the Citizen Lab of the Toronto University suggesting that Zoom's primarily catering to North American clients that sometimes distributes encryption keys through servers in China is potentially concerning, given that the company may be legally obligated to disclose these keys to authorities in China.

The report claimed that a scan shows a total of five servers in China and 68 in the US that run the same Zoom server software as the Beijing server, and the lab suspects that keys may be distributed through these servers.

The Global Times learned from a marketing manager of Zoom China surnamed Zhao on Monday that the company has taken measures in corresponding to the safety concerns of online meeting.

Zhao did not comment on the accusation from the report.

Xiang Ligang, a veteran telecom industry analyst in Beijing, told the Global Times on Monday that he does not see the point that these streams would be taken by the authorities.

"Talking for half an hour between two people requires at least one gigabyte's storage capacity, and the video has to be encoded, compressed, transmitted and decoded, making it costly to do a lot of analysis of a broad stream of video," said Xiang.

However, experts also believe that Zoom's work on service definition and specification needs to be improved, otherwise it may continue to be exploited by biased foreign institute as an easy target for its relevance with China.

"Although Zoom is not a Chinese company, its owner is a Chinese, and as long as it is related to Chinese people, it will have the pressure [from some foreign accusations]," said Sun Yuzhong, a researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology under Chinese Academy of Sciences. He added that there's no difficulty or problem with end-to-end technology, but Zoom really needs to work on transparency of data and claims of security.

"This incident showed that the company did not say the ability and effect that its encryption work can achieve," Sun said, adding that Zoom needs to learn from Chinese technology company Huawei in terms of enforcing data transparency and security declarations.

In respond to the accusation, Eric S. Yuan, founder of Zoom, said on his blog on Friday that they have taken steps to address two primary topics — geo-fencing and meeting encryption — and are sharing these steps as part of their ongoing commitment to improve security and privacy.