With the increasing use of Zoom, you may have heard stories in the news about uninvited guests joining meetings and being disruptive. Zoom has several features designed to help prevent this activity.
The following options can be defined when you set up or edit an existing meeting.
- Require Meeting Password—This setting allows you to set a password for your meeting. The most important thing you can do to help protect your meeting is to keep the meeting invite and password (if used) private. Share the meeting password privately with your participants. Don’t post it to social media or public websites where uninvited guests can find and misuse it.
- Waiting Room—This option puts participants in a staging area, where they wait until the host invites them into the Zoom meeting. This gives the host more control over who is joining and the ability to keep out uninvited guests. This option works better for small meetings but can be customized to accommodate larger groups.
- Authenticated Users—This option requires users to sign into Zoom to join your meeting. While this is more secure than a public meeting, it still has risks; uninvited users who are logged into Zoom can still join your meeting.
If you are using the Zoom desktop application, the waiting room and authenticated user options are located under Advanced Options.
For security reasons, the screen sharing ability on Michigan Tech’s Zoom account is set by default to host only. This can be changed for your meeting by selecting the arrow next to Screen Sharing at the bottom of the meeting window. You can change this for your events in your settings at the Michigan Tech Zoom Page.
Zoom addresses these concerns and features in a recent blog post: How To Keep Uninvited Guests Out of Your Zoom Event, including how to take advantage of these features and related articles.