As mentioned in a previous article, I think Zoom is a brilliant collaboration tool, and is a real must-have especially for anyone who finds themselves having to work from home now days.

However, because of its ease of use and performance, use of the app has sky-rocketed in the last few weeks with the Coronavirus outbreak, and naturally that has led to a lot of people scrutinising the platform.

From this massive increase in usage and scrutiny, there have been several high profile questions asked about Zoom’s privacy policy and what Zoom captures and does with your recordings and data.

I want to cover some of the in-built options that Zoom already has to help you protect yourself when using it. Many of these options you will only find if you log into the settings page on the Zoom website (not the app).

Secure your Zoom Personal Room

Personal rooms are re-usable meeting rooms, with a link that doesn’t expire and therefore can be used several times. It might look something like this:

https://zoom.us/j/I23456789O

(this bit after “/j/” is actually a 10 digit number, I was going to use 1234567890 i my example, but when I checked, that was actually someone’s personal meeting room and I nearly joined it by accident!!

Which is exactly my point!)

This makes the personal room really convenient because they are easy to access, and once you’ve shared them you can re-use them again and again without having to schedule and send a new link or invite.

However, there are drawbacks to this, the most notable is that if you regularly use your personal room with different people, you might find people accidentally (or deliberately) stumble into a conversation you are having with someone else.

For example: Imagine I’m interviewing several candidates for a job, and I share my personal link with all the candidates. After speaking with Candidate A, I then have another call with Candidate B. During this call Candidate A then clicks on the link I shared again and all of a sudden I am in a call with both Candidate A and Candidate B!

There are several things you can do to solve this issue. The screen shots below are from the Zoom settings page

1) Turn off personal meeting in scheduled and instant meetings to avoid accidentally using this option

2) Don’t be surprised by new people on the call, make sure everyone is announced when they join

3) Don’t allow people to rejoin once they’ve been removed from the room.

4) Set up your waiting room, so participants can’t just jump into the call without you allowing them in.

5) Password protect your meetings, including your Personal Meeting link

Secure your Zoom Cloud Recordings

If you do record your meetings, make sure you password protect them. For this you need to head to the settings page, then the Recording tab.

Unless you are very sure you want your attendees to record the session, turn off this tick box in this setting. But don’t turn off the Local Recording because recording and saving your meetings locally on your own computer might be a more secure option for you than storing it on Zoom’s cloud.

Turn off local recording for participants

Enable authentication and passwords for cloud recordings

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