Zoom security

When holding and advertising meetings online, it is important to consider the security aspect. Zoom trolls have become a thing. They are people, sometimes fascists, that will join publicly advertised meetings in an attempt to disrupt them. They particularly use the screen share feature to post offensive material. Comrades should take measures to stop this before starting the meeting.

Comrades that host/chair the meeting should familiarise themselves with the controls before meeting starts, disable screen sharing and, depending on meeting, mute participants on entry (https://blog.zoom.us/keep-uninvited-guests-out-of-your-zoom-event). As in any other meeting, hostile elements should be removed by the host. Participants can also be blocked from unmuting themselves, which would be useful in large meetings.

In general, Zoom's privacy and security is very poorly rated, with revalations about uncorrected security flaws, Chinese government spies inside the company, and so on. So, the platform should by no means be considered secure. Nevertheless, some settings are available to improve the privacy and security.

You can find an overview of the features here: https://zoom.us/trust/security

End-to-end-encryption

Zoom end-to-end encryption will theoretically stop someone listening in to the conversation, even if they had access to Zoom's servers. It depends on how reliable the implementation is but theoretically it would provide very good privacy.

This is how you turn it on:

Sign in to Zoom’s web portal.
Go to Account Management → Account Settings
Enable “Allow use of end-to-end encryption is enabled.”
Click “Enable” when prompted to verify the change.
Next, select your default security level. “Enhanced encryption” is best if you want to keep using all of Zoom’s features. Selecting “End-to-end Encryption” will use E2EE for all meetings but restricted features will always be disabled for calls you host.
Click “Save.”

Using end-to-end encryption in a meeting presently disables the following features of Zoom:

Join before host
Cloud recording
Live streaming
Live transcription
Breakout Rooms
Polling

Further information: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360048660871