Coronavirus: Citing privacy concerns, New York City bans schools from using Zoom amid lockdown

The virus has brought all schools, colleges and other hubs to a halt and students are practising social distancing and self-isolation during the pandemic. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the governments all around are urging people to stay at home.

However, officials in New York City stated that schools are not permitted to use Zoom for remote teaching, raising online security concerns with the video conferencing service.

“Providing a safe and secure remote learning experience for our students is essential, and upon further review of security concerns, schools should move away from using Zoom as soon as possible,” Danielle Filson, a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education said.

“There are many new components to remote learning, and we are making real-time decisions in the best interest of our staff and students.”

Instead, NY's Dept. of Education is changing over schools to Microsoft Teams, which the Danielle claimed has the “same capabilities with appropriate security measures in place.”

Almost 1.1 million students at more than 1,800 schools across the city will be using the video conferencing service until the precautionary lockdown is lifted. Under New York City’s Cyber Command, the decision to ban Zoom from schools was taken.

The ban comes right after the video conferencing service company started receiving a lot of criticism for poor security policies and privacy practices from it users.

On April 3, the chief executive of Zoom publicly apologized for “mistakenly” routing some calls through China and for also claiming its service was end-to-end encrypted when it's clearly not.

The death toll in the US is inching toward 10,000 with the John Hopkins University tracker putting the number of cases over 337,000. 

As the numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths mount in the US, the country's surgeon general warned that this week could resemble a "Pearl Harbor moment" and a "9/11 moment."

The global death toll has reached 69,444 while the total number of recorded cases worldwide are 1,273,990, according to John Hopkins University's tracker. 

The highest number of cases have been recorded in the US where 337,274 are confirmed to have contracted the disease. 9,634 people have so far lost their lives due to COVID-19.