Do you use Zoom? The answer is likely yes. After the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, seemingly everyone who had to work, attend school, or even socialize from home started using the videoconferencing service.
Zoom Meetings is now perhaps the world's most-used web conferencing platform. In April 2020, Zoom announced the milestone of 300 million daily meeting participants. Today, the software registers over 3.3 trillion annual meeting minutes.
The more we use it, the more comfortable we might get with the software. But that doesn't mean everything about Zoom is completely safe.
Public posting of Zoom meeting links is known to compromise meeting security. To discourage unwanted guests from joining your Zoom meeting (often referred to as "zoombombing"), it is strongly recommended that you do not publicly post meeting links on social media platforms and other online sites.
To ensure platform safety, privacy, and security, take these steps to reduce the risk of a Zoom meeting interruption and make your meeting private:
- Use the waiting room: One of the best ways to secure your meeting is to turn on Zoom's waiting room feature. This feature provides a virtual waiting room for your attendees and allows you to admit individual meeting participants into your meeting at your discretion.
- As meeting attendees arrive, Zoom will notify you and provide you a list of those in the meeting, and those still in the waiting room, so you have total control of who joins your meeting.
- Once you've admitted an attendee into your meeting, you can easily push them back to the waiting room or remove them from the meeting altogether and can even prevent their return.
- Don't use a personal meeting ID for public meetings: Your personal meeting ID (PMI) is the default meeting room permanently reserved for you. Your PMI doesn't change unless you change it yourself, which makes it very useful if people need a way to reach you. However, once a participant has the link to your PMI, they can join any meeting you create with it.
For public meetings, you should always schedule new meetings with randomly generated meeting IDs. This way only invited attendees will know how to join your meeting.
- Require a Passcode to Join: You can take meeting security even further by requiring a passcode to join your meetings. This feature can be applied to both your PMI, so only those with the passcode will be able to reach you, or to newly scheduled meetings.
This setting changes your meeting to only allow people who have zoom accounts and are logged in to join your meeting.
- Only Allow Registered Users: Zoom can also give you peace of mind by letting you know exactly who will be attending your meeting. When scheduling a meeting, you can require attendees to register with their e-mail, name, and custom questions.
- If you would like to advertise your meeting, you can then share this registration link. Use the registration link to post in a public place like on a website or in an email.
- This allows hosts to approve registrations before sharing zoom meeting links.
- Convert a meeting to a webinar: Webinars allow you to promote your meeting publicly, but gives you control over who participates with video, audio, chat, and screen sharing.
In order to convert your meeting into a webinar, your scheduled meeting must use an automatically generated meeting ID and cannot be scheduled with your PMI.
- Lock down the meeting: If you know exactly who belongs in your meeting, and they're all there, you can lock down the meeting by clicking on the "Security" link at the bottom of the screen and choosing "Lock Meeting." Once you do that, even somebody who has the meeting ID and password cannot get in.