“The success of these class actions is just one of many indicators that courts, policymakers, regulators and individuals are scrutinizing companies’ handling of data and in many instances finding it lacking,” says Caitlin Fennessy, chief knowledge officer and vice-president at the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), a nonprofit interest group.

The Zoom case is not the first of its kind and, in general, privacy-related class action suits are gaining traction in both the US and Europe. The suit serves as a high-profile reminder of the increasingly heated data privacy debates playing out within the walls of big tech companies and in the halls of Congress. This came in the form of an email from a case administrator detailing the agreement and outlining who may be eligible for compensation and how to file a claim. Though the settlement was initially filed in July, it wasn’t until late November that many former and current Zoom users learned about the debacle. The lawsuit alleges that the company also failed to appropriately mitigate ‘Zoombombings,’ the phenomenon in which hackers barge into users’ meetings. Zoom on July 31 agreed to pay $85m to settle a class action suit alleging that the company violated users’ privacy rights by falsely claiming that its platform is end-to-end encrypted and sharing users’ personal information with the likes of Facebook, Google and other third parties without adequate permission.

What is the zoom class action lawsuit