Take Zoom. According to its website, there’s a feature that, when turned on, can tell hosts if chat participants have navigated away from the active Zoom window for more than 30 seconds. Simply put, your computer narcs you out to your boss when you’re paying more attention to Reddit than you are a morning meeting. Crafty teens figured out that they could cheat the system while attending online classes by looping a video or just adding a still image as their custom background in Zoom Rooms. While Mrs. Such and Such drones on about Franz Ferdinand, teens can leave their laptop running while enjoying Animal Crossing on Nintendo’s Switch, or watching porn, or whatever it is kids do these days.
— Kate Buckley (@EchinoKate) March 17, 2020 Adults have taken notice too. Matt Buckley recently went viral in a tweet showing how easy it is to disappear from meetings by adding a custom still image of himself to appear present. Granted, a video on a short loop, perhaps of him nodding or appearing as disinterested as the rest of us, would be even more convincing. He told Vice: Creating a custom Zoom backround, unfortunatelly, requires a subscription to Zoom Rooms — and that’s not cheap. Zoom Rooms subscriptions run $500 a year, though your employer (or school) could already have paid the tab to use for meetings or online classes. My wife suggested I make one where I randomly pop my head in from just off screen and then I tried the video [on Twitter].
