Changes you can make to Zoom settings for greater privacy and to block Zoombombing

In the days of being quarantined due to the coronavirus pandemic, people are using the heck out of internet meeting platforms and the most popular one is Zoom. It’s now in use by 200 million daily, twenty times more users than it served just three months ago. Zoom provides a solution to one of the most urgent problem on people’s minds today, communicating. But it has also been discovered that the Zoom platform creates opportunities for exploiting users’ privacy and even for hackers to take over and control meetings.

However, all is not lost. Zoom quickly began offering enhanced privacy protections and promises that more are coming soon. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (@EFF) is taking a wait and see attitude about promised future changes, but indicates that it is pleased with Zoom’s response so far.

Zoom has responded with a surprisingly good plan for next steps, but talk is cheap. Zoom will have to follow through on its security and privacy promises if it wants to regain users’ trust. 

Here are the EFF’s recommendations for how you can toggle Zoom preferences to make meetings more secure and also to block possible Zoombombing episodes. Zoombombing is when a meeting is crashed by a hacker who takes over and posts graphics nobody wants to see – like porn, for example.

You can trust the EFF as it really is what it claims to be: “The leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.”

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