Zoom has announced in a blog post that it is working on tools to enable targeted blocking of its users based on their geographical location. This follows criticism after it admitted to blocking accounts at the behest of the Chinese government.

Before now, Zoom had already faced heavy criticism for its links to the Chinese government. The latest one involves taking direct orders from the Chinese government to block anti-government accounts.

“Zoom is developing technology over the next several days that will enable us to remove or block at the participant level based on geography. This will enable us to comply with requests from local authorities when they determine activity on our platform is illegal within their borders,” Zoom said.

Zoom had suspended some accounts, which have links with organising meetings to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre on 4th June 2020. The company got heavy criticism from pro-democracy activists for the move, however, it doesn’t seem to mind.

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The Pro-democracy activists criticised Zoom’s compliance with such requests from the Chinese government.

“Companies with a conscience should not accept requests from dictatorships,” one of the affected activists, Wang Dan told the Financial Times. He said that his team has since switched to using Google for its web calls. “As an American company, Zoom has the responsibility to defend American values,” he said.

With this new feature, Zoom says it wouldn’t have to terminate meetings. Instead, Zoom would be blocking out users from a particular location from attending. So meetings could hold outside of China without users in the location attending. Meaning Zoom wouldn’t have to take down the meeting.

Zoom says it won’t let requests from the Chinese government impact users outside of China going forward.

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