Messenger Rooms Vs Zoom

Nuwantha Fernando
3 min readApr 28, 2020

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Messenger Rooms vs Zoom

As a reason of coronavirus spread over the globe the people forced to social distance and self-quarantine. Therefore, all the office communities were directed to online conferences. So that Zoom became the new norm and its popularity has exploded like never before. However, the popularity of the application has become its downfall. Because due to the popularity of the application, it was garnered the attention of cybercriminals and malicious users. Therefore, Government agencies, Educational Institutions including the US Senate, Taiwan, the Australian Defense Force, NASA, and New York City’s Department of Education have banned Zoom. As well as the major companies in the trend was also followed the similar practices. Including Google, SpaceX, and Smart Communications have also banned the Zoom.

Impacts of Zoom security issues on the enterprise

The following 10 businesses had the most respondents reportedly stop accepting Zoom because of security concerns:

  1. Tesla (100%)
  2. Salesforce (37%)
  3. Cisco (30%)
  4. Adobe (22%)
  5. Apple (21%)
  6. Microsoft (20%)
  7. Google (18%)
  8. Intel (17%)
  9. Expedia (15%)
  10. LinkedIn (12%)

Moreover, the following 10 companies had the most respondents say they were worried their information may have been compromised during the Zoom breaches:

  1. Cisco (71%)
  2. Apple (55%)
  3. Microsoft (51%)
  4. Google (47%)
  5. LinkedIn (42%)
  6. Square (41%)
  7. Tesla (39%)
  8. SAP (38%)
  9. Intel (36%)
  10. Amazon (34%)

Arrival of Messanger Rooms

As a result of the Zoom security failures, Mark Zuckerberg and the team is introducing Messanger Rooms as a solution. He announced it via Facebook Live. Through the live video, he talked a good bit about security measures that were given to the Messanger Rooms. Moreover, the Messanger Rooms is coming up with some fancy functionalities. Such as 3D Backgrounds and a possible game-changer in payment processing for entrepreneurs.

Introduction to Messanger Rooms

Facebook Messenger is already having video chat ability, but it was limited only for several peoples, and also in its requirement that all of them have a Facebook account. But with the Messanger Rooms it will changed. Initially, you can host video chats of up to 50 people it is not depending on whether the user is having a Facebook account or not, anyone can join through a link to the Room you have created. Like Zoom, with one click they can then join the conversation. And the most important thing is Messanger Rooms is not having any time limitations.
Facebook users will get additional benefits. if you are a Facebook user, then you can play with AR effects and new features like immersive backgrounds and mood lighting. Moreover, The creator of a Room is getting following functionalities,

  1. The creator can choose who can see and join to the video room
  2. Ability to remove anyone from the call at any time.
  3. Lock the Room if they don’t want anyone else to enter.

And also other members can leave a Room whenever they want. Rooms which creates through a Facebook Group are open by default to members of that Group.

The Rooms feature is not end-to-end encrypted, because “there are significant challenges” to implementing such encryption for video calling with large groups of people. However, Facebook says it’s actively working towards this for the future. In the meantime, Room content is encrypted between participants and the Facebook servers, that are “placed in only a handful of countries that have a strong rule of law”. The company also promises that it doesn’t watch or listen to your audio or video calls.

Messenger Rooms is rolling out “in some countries” this week, and will expand globally “in the coming weeks”.

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Nuwantha Fernando
Nuwantha Fernando

Written by Nuwantha Fernando

BSc (Hons) in Computer Science and Software Engineering | Software Engineer at Treinetic (pvt) Ltd