Today (May 7), Zoom CEO Eric S. Yuan announced the acquisition of Keybase, a New York startup offering encrypted messaging, file sharing, and file storage services.

"We are excited to integrate the Keybase team into the Zoom family and help build end-to-end encryption that can reach Zoom's current scalability," Yuan said in a Zoom blog post. [Keybase's technology allows Zoom to quickly deploy true end-to-end encryption for its paying clients.

Once Keybase's end-to-end encryption is in place, content from Zoom meetings where the host has chosen to enable this feature will only be visible to meeting participants; Zoom itself will not have access to the content; and the host will not have access to the content.

Phone calls will not be properly encrypted and meeting participants will not be able to participate by phone. The meeting host cannot record the meeting and store it on Zoom's cloud server, but everyone in the meeting can capture the video on their own devices.

"We believe that Zoom can deliver the video quality and scale that has made Zoom the video quality and scale of choice for more than 300 million everyday meeting participants, including some of the world's largest companies, while providing the same or better security than existing consumer end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms," Yuan wrote.

End-to-end encryption is not an option for users of the free Zoom service, so unfortunately, you cannot fully encrypt your cousin's Zoom birthday party.

Currently, Zoom meeting content is encrypted from the client side (i.e., you) to the server side (i.e., Zoom); Zoom's server can see the content if it needs to, and needs to if someone joins from a phone; Zoom is called this setup end-to-end encryption, but not everyone in the technology world agreed.

The standard definition of end-to-end encryption is that only people on the client side (you and the person you are communicating with) can see the contents of the message, not the intermediary server.

Apple, Signal, WhatsApp, and many other services use true end-to-end encryption for their messaging technology.

According to CNBC, Keybase has about 25 employees and was founded in 2014; terms of the Zoom acquisition were not disclosed.

Keybase started out as a key repository that distributed public keys needed to use public key cryptography. Later, they began offering desktop and mobile software to make it easier for people to use their cryptographic standards.

Not to get too deep, but if you want to communicate securely with someone using public key cryptography, aka asymmetric cryptography, you must first know their public key.

Your web browser uses public key cryptography every day to establish secure communication with websites, and Keybase has figured out how to tie the distribution of individual users' public keys to their social media accounts in ways we don't fully understand.