I let out an audible “wow” upon reading this. This is absolutely bone-headed and I have no idea how they thought automatically grouping members by their email domain name was a good idea.
You gotta figure, as soon as you starting writing a blacklist of “common” domains like gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc, your immediate thought should probably be “wait, maybe we’re doing this wrong.”
You’re right but I absolutely see why they are doing this. When I saw all my colleagues in the company list I immediately figured they only have the email domain and I found it extremely useful to see whom I can contact without explaining how zoom works. Privacy isn’t our most important concern right now, it’s keeping the world running, and this “feature” helped me/us (if only just a little bit) communicate more effectively.
Why wouldn’t this be an opt in feature per-organization? I’m acme co, I buy a zoom subscription for acme.com, I click a box saying “let everyone with an acme.com email address see each other”. Done. Yes, I would have to prove I own acme.com, but we have solutions for that (didn’t set out to make this joke but, the ACME protocol, for one.)
Why is it that it’s on by default for arbitrary domains (excepting the ones some poor soul has to blacklist)?
I don't mean to be overly snarky, but removing authentication from all computers and servers would also help everyone (if only just a little bit) be more effective. It's still a bad idea, crisis or not.
You gotta figure, as soon as you starting writing a blacklist of “common” domains like gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc, your immediate thought should probably be “wait, maybe we’re doing this wrong.”