Security News > 2020 > July > Researchers extract personal data from video conference screenshots

Video conference users should not post screen images of Zoom and other video conference sessions on social media, according to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev researchers, who easily identified people from public screenshots of video meetings on Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.

While there have been many privacy issues associated with video conferencing, the BGU researchers looked at what types of information they could extract from video collage images that were posted online or via social media.

"The findings in our paper indicate that it is relatively easy to collect thousands of publicly available images of video conference meetings and extract personal information about the participants, including their face images, age, gender, and full names," says Dr. Michael Fire, BGU Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering.

Cross-referencing facial image data with social network data may cause greater privacy risk as it is possible to identify a user that appears in several video conference meetings and maliciously aggregate different information sources about the targeted individual.

These include not posting video conference images online, or sharing videos; using generic pseudonyms like "iZoom" or "iPhone" rather than a unique username or real name; and using a virtual background vs. a real background since it can help fingerprint a user account across several meetings.

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