Google Meet Upgrade Aims To Make Zoombombing A Thing Of The Past – Forbes

Presentations and classes without gatecrashers are promised with the latest Google Meet upgrade.

Google Meet has just announced an update which will mean that Zoombombing is history. Its been confirmed that it will be rolled out to G Suite for Education customers and was announced in the G Suite Updates blog and picked up by Damien Wilde at 9to5Google.

Zoombombing, youll know, is that phenomenon which first appeared early in the Covid-19 pandemic and wreaked havoc for a while. It happened because Zoom, in the early days at least, had a somewhat relaxed relationship with security. This meant that strangers with frankly very little information, were able to gatecrash video calls. The results were that pranksters or those with more sinister intent could burst into private meetings. Though some of these crashes were surprising and comical, others were more serious and had ramifications such as causing a meeting to end or delivering inappropriate content to schoolchildren, say.

Its significant that Google has focused todays announcement on its education users, since lessons were definitely heavily impacted by Zoombombing.

More features are coming to Google Meet as it tries to take on Zoom and Teams.

However, the fact that its coming to education customers and has been announced on the education blog does not indicate it will stay only there. Plenty of other Google Meet features which were announced first for education, arrived for other users soon after.

Google points out that anonymous users can be very disruptive, being distracting or worse by sharing content, making noise and so on.

So this upgrade uses a simple mechanism which will make a big difference. Heres how Google described the change:

To increase the privacy of education meetings in Google Meet, anonymous users (users not signed into a Google account) 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.

If youre not invited, youre not coming in. The new security settings will be put in place by default, which means there are no extra things for an administrator to do, though they can be removed if a customer contacts G Suite Support.

The new feature is being rolled out gradually, over the next 15 days, beginning from July 13, 2020. Initially its just for G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education customers, but check back for more details when every Google Meet customer is protected from unwelcome gatecrashing.

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Google Meet Upgrade Aims To Make Zoombombing A Thing Of The Past - Forbes