Accessibility statement

Important information: email from ZoomInfo

Posted on 5 November 2023

Some University students have reported recently receiving an email from an organisation called ‘ZoomInfo’ with the subject line ‘Notice of personal information processing.’

These emails are the result of ZoomInfo collecting personal data from York users, and you may wish to take some action if you have received one, or if you have recently installed ZoomInfo software.

What is ZoomInfo?

ZoomInfo is a ‘sales intelligence’ business that collects, processes and sells personal data it collects online to third parties. It is not related to the web conferencing tool Zoom. 

It is understood that a small number of York users have installed ZoomInfo software and granted it permission to access their contacts, which has resulted in data being collected for a much wider number of users.

We believe that the data collected is limited to names, University email address, job title and extension number and that this is of low risk to the majority of students.

What to do next?

Whilst this is considered to be low risk, if you have any concerns, please contact Cyber Security via the IT Support Office.

If you would like to request that ZoomInfo remove your information we’ve created a knowledge article to run you through their process.

If you have knowingly installed any ZoomInfo software or are accessing any ZoomInfo services, on either managed or personal devices, please contact the Cyber Security Team, via the IT Support Office,  for further support and guidance.  

Online security

This is an important reminder of the requirement to understand and risk assess third party services prior to their use or installation, and this includes ‘plugins’ or ‘add-ons’ to browsers. The IT Outsourcing and Cloud Computing Policy explains the procedures, risk assessments and permissions required before third party solutions can be selected and implemented.

If in doubt please reach out to IT Support before you install or grant permissions to anything that doesn’t exist within the Software Centre.