The coronavirus pandemic has made video conferencing incredibly popular, but also given us a new term to learn: zoombombing. It's the name given to anonymous users entering your video chat and causing all sorts of disruption. Now Google is set to protect educators against zoombombing on Google Meet.
Google classes an anonymous user as someone who isn't signed in with a Google account. Anyone classed as a G Suite for Education user will have their privacy increased in the coming days. As the G Suite Updates site explains, "anonymous users can no longer join meetings organized by anyone with a G Suite for Education or G Suite Enterprise for Education license. This prevents participants from sharing a link publicly to encourage anonymous users to request access."
It's possible to disable the new protection, but it needs to be requested by an Admin and contact made with G Suite support to make it happen. It's on by default otherwise, and should be in place for all education users within 15 days, so before the end of July.
As to why Google is implementing this protection, according to ZDNet, students have been known to share the link to a scheduled Google Meet and ask pranksters to crash the video call. The hope being that the teacher gives up on a lesson and they can leave early. Within the coming days, that will no longer be possible, and even if someone does manage to crash a call they will be known by the Google account they used to gain entry with.
Further Reading
- Zoom Launches Hardware-as-a-Service Products
- Zoom Extends End-to-End Encryption to Free Users—If They Give a Phone Number
- Microsoft Teams Finally Lets You Easily Add Custom Background Images
- Zoom to Obey China's Censorship Requests, But Only for Mainland Chinese Users
- More in Video Conferencing Software