zoom – Bredemarket

A Californian, an Illinoisan, and a Dane Walk Into a Videoconference

I was recently talking with a former colleague, whose name I am not at liberty to reveal, and they posed a question that stymied me.

What happens when multiple people join a videoconference, and they all reside in jurisdictions with different privacy regulations?

An example will illustrate what would happen, and I volunteer to be the evil party in this one.

The videoconference

Let’s say:

On a particular day in April 2026, a Californian launches a videoconference on Zoom.

The Californian invites an Illinoisan.

And also invites a Dane.

And then—here’s the evil part—records and gathers images from the videoconference without letting the other two know.

The legal violations

Despite the fact that the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA, requires written consent before acquiring Abe’s facial geometry. And if Cali John doesn’t obtain that written consent, he could lose a lot of money.

And what about Freja? Well, if the Danish Copyright Act takes effect on March 31, 2026 as expected, Cali John can get into a ton of trouble if he uses the video to create a realistic, digitally generated imitation of Freja. Again, consent is required. Again, there can be monetary penalties if you don’t get that consent.

But there’s another question we have to consider.

The vendor responsibility

Does the videoconference provider bear any responsibility for the violations of Illinois and Danish law?

Since I used Zoom as my example, I looked at Zoom’s EULA Terms of Service.

TL;DR: not our problem, that’s YOUR problem.

“5. USE OF SERVICES AND YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES. You may only use the Services pursuant to the terms of this Agreement. You are solely responsible for Your and Your End Users’ use of the Services and shall abide by, and ensure compliance with, all Laws in connection with Your and each End User’s use of the Services, including but not limited to Laws related to recording, intellectual property, privacy and export control. Use of the Services is void where prohibited.”

But such requirements haven’t stopped BIPA lawyers from filing lawsuits against deep pocketed software vendors. Remember when Facebook settled for $650 million?

So remember what could happen the next time you participate in a multinational, multi-state, or even multi-city videoconference. Hope your AI note taker isn’t capturing screen shots.

Zoom Scam With Faces

An interesting variant on fraudulent deepfake scams.

Kenny Li of Manta fame was sucked into a scam attempt, but was able to perceive the scam before any damage was done.

Li responded to a message from a known contact, which resulted in a Telegram conversation, which resulted in a Zoom call.

“In the call, there were team members who had their cameras on, and [the] Manta founder could see their faces. He mentioned that “Everything looked very real. But I couldn’t hear them.” Then came the “Zoom update required” prompt…”

Li didn’t fall for it.

(Imagen 3)

And one more thing…

The formal announcement is embargoed until Monday, but Bredemarket has TWO openings to act as your on-demand marketing muscle for facial recognition or cybersecurity:

compelling content creation
winning proposal development
actionable analysis

Book a call: https://bredemarket.com/cpa/

A love letter to a competitor?

There are different ways in which a company can position itself against its competitors. No one way is right; the company has to choose its own method.

On one extreme, the company could simply refuse to mention the competitors at all. In this case, the company would market its claimed superiority solely based upon its own merits, without comparing against others.

On the other extreme, the company could trash its competitors. I don’t need to find examples of that; we already know them. (I personally abhor this method, because it doesn’t reflect well on the company doing the trashing.)

Between these two extremes, a company can state its own merits and, without trashing the competition, claim its superiority by comparison.

For example, a company could write a love letter to its competitors.

Seriously.

As in “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.” The famous ad that Apple ran when IBM entered the personal computer market.

By Rama & Musée Bolo – File:IBM_PC-IMG_7271.jpg, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94784371

But I have a more recent example.

If you are following the Bredemarket LinkedIn page (you ARE following the Bredemarket LinkedIn page, aren’t you?), you’ve seen a couple of recent mentions of the company Volley. The company is planning to release a new communications app that it claims will improve communication over all of the other communications apps.

In that vein, Volley’s CEO Josh Little wrote a “love letter” to Slack entitled “Dear Slack, You haven’t solved the problem…” It starts off in a positive tone.

First off, thank you for trying. It was a valiant effort and someone needed to take a solid stab at the problem. Our hats are off. You’ve built a great piece of technology and a faster horse.

But after that, the rest of Little’s article gently explains how Slack’s solution hasn’t really solved the inherent problem. (TL;DR Little asserts that Slack’s emphasis on text does not provide a complete communications solution, and ends up with people devoting MORE time to using Slack.)

Little ends the article by asserting what Volley will be. Because the app is not yet released, we can not see for ourselves what the app does. So Little creates a picture of Volley as occupying the middle position between Slack (text-based asynchronous communication) and Zoom (conversation-based synchronous communication). Volley occupies the “conversation-based asynchronous communication” position, and claims to include features that will actually REDUCE the time that people spend on Volley, rather than having Volley become yet another time sink in our collection of time sinks. For example, communications from others can be played back at 2x (or 1.5x) speed, reducing the amount of time needed to consume the content.

I’m not saying that marketers have to be like Volley, or that marketers have to be like Steve Jobs 1.0 Apple, or that marketers have to be like Steve Jobs 2.0 Apple.

A company needs to adopt its own tone for addressing its competitors. And everyone communicating on behalf of the company, from the CEO to the factory worker, should ideally adopt the same tone.