TOBY SHAPSHAK: Be warned, free services are costly

Dear parliament, let me tell you about meeting software called Teams. It’s made by Microsoft, with which the government has a big contract for software. It’s part of the package and you can run a whole company on it. Microsoft itself has been doing this for years — it’s known in the tech industry as "eating your own dog food".

So, why Teams and not the easier-to-use Zoom? Well, after last week’s Zoombombing of the virtual meeting of the National Assembly’s programming committee, that question answers itself. Nothing like MPs being shown porn and having racist slurs yelled at them to prove that free software has its hazards.

Zoom has exploded from nowhere to become one of the heroes — and, very quickly, zeros — of the lockdown months. Designed to be easy to use, it has rocketed in popularity and grown its users from 30-million to 300-million. But it has had security issues for a long time and has failed to address them. One of those is a default setting that lets anyone share their screen with the other participant – and this is how the Zoombombers show their porn. Better security settings are available in paid-for versions.

And this isn’t the first time this has happened to MPs. Last month it happened in a meeting chaired by minister of women, youth & persons with disabilities Maite Nkoana-Mashabane.

Zoom was banned in April by Google, Nasa, Taiwan and Canada. But our parliament’s IT department still uses communications software with known security flaws. I’d say it’s a fireable offence, but this is the politically impermeable era of ANC nonaccountability.

Zoom has had security issues for a long time, and it has failed to address them

Microsoft, meanwhile, makes its money from selling you the actual software. Who knew we’d come to love a company that sold us something instead of mining our personal data to sell us advertising?

It bears repeating: if the product is free, you are the product.

By now, surely, the world has learnt this from the Facebook data privacy debacle, in which Cambridge Analytica harvested tens of millions of personal profiles that it used to wreck democratic elections in the US and the UK. Facebook’s WhatsApp, meanwhile, has over 1-billion users, to go with Facebook’s 2.3-billion and the billion-plus of Messenger and Instagram.

Increasingly, WhatsApp is being used for voice and video calling, as is Messenger. Could Facebook end up having a huge share of internet telephony? Similarly, Google has billions of users through its search engine, Android software for smartphones, Gmail, YouTube, Maps and more – and huge datasets on them too. Its Hangouts software also handles conferencing. Tech giants are increasingly becoming our communications service providers.

However, if something is for free, it’s not worth the price you’ll pay for it.

But that is a conversation for another day. On Microsoft Teams. Or Skype. Or FaceTime.