Google adds ‘Zoombombing’ prevention feature in Meet, says it will make education meetings secure

Google is adding a new feature to its Google Meet video chat service that won’t let anonymous users enter in to a session – something that Zoom was not able to take care of and it resulted in ‘Zoombombing’. This came as an announcement from Google on the G Suite blog post. The search giant said that it is taking this step to tighten the security and privacy of teachers and students during education meeting on the platform. If you have a G Suite for Education or G Suite Enterprise for Education license and are holding a session, anonymous users won’t be able to join your meetings.

“To increase the privacy of education meetings in Google Meet, anonymous users (users not signed into a Google account) can no longer join meetings organized by anyone with a G Suite for Education or G Suite Enterprise for Education license. This prevents participants from sharing a link publicly to encourage anonymous users to request access,” said the firm.

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These changes will be taking place in the next 15 days. As per Google, anonymous users are those who are not signed into a Google account.

This ‘Zoombombing’ protection in Google Meet video is introduced as many schools have moved to online classes using video conferencing platforms. As ZDNet notes, this will also prevent students from deliberately asking pranksters to crash their classes using public links.

The name, obviously comes from video conferencing platform Zoom, which already has a bunch of security features to prevent this. However, the term ‘Zoombombing’ is now commonly used for any such kind of breaches.