With many groups and meetings using Zoom, making your meetings more secure can sometimes become necessary. Here are some practical tips to help:

  1. Don’t Use Personal Meeting ID for Public Meetings Your Personal Meeting ID (PMI) is the default meeting that launches when you start and ad hoc meeting. Your PMI doesn’t change unless you change it yourself, which makes it very useful if people need a way to reach you. But for public meetings, you should always schedule new meetings with randomly generated meeting IDs. That way, only invited attendees will know how to join your meeting. You can also turn off your PMI when starting an instant meeting in your profile settings.
  2. Require a Password to Join You can take meeting security even further by requiring a password to join your meetings. This feature can be applied to both your Personal Meeting ID, so only those with the password will be able to reach you, and to newly scheduled meetings. To learn all the ways to add a password for your meetings, please view this support article.
  3. Lock the Meeting Once all your attendees have arrived, you can easily lock your meeting from the security menu, preventing any additional attendees from joining.
  4. Manage Participants
    • Control Screen Sharing. Allowing participants to screen share in a meeting can be a great way to collaborate, but that can also leave you open to unwanted interruptions during larger meetings. Determine if you want other participants in the meeting to be able to share their screens, or if you want to be the only one with that ability. You can easily toggle this feature on and off from the screen sharing menu, as well as the security menu.
    • Disable Private Chat. In-meeting chat adds another dimension of collaboration to your meetings, creating a place for questions to be asked and fielded later, or for supplemental resources to be posted. But sometimes chat can become distracting or unproductive. In those cases, you can disable and enable chat throughout your meeting.
    • Turn Off Annotation. Like screen sharing and in-meeting chat, annotation can be a great tool when you need it, but it can also be an opportunity for mischief when you don’t. To avoid unwanted annotation, you can disable this for the entire meeting, or just temporarily.

Additionally, here’s a video (produced by the Small Group Network) that explains what you can do to host a more secure Zoom meeting with your group.

Though, there are other video conferencing solutions out there (WebEx, Google Hangouts, BlueJeans, etc.). So don’t feel obligated to make Zoom work for you.