Zoom has become one of the most popular video call apps for people that work from home. Using Zoom, teams can communicate effectively with their colleagues, participate in remote meetings and also give seminars and presentations. One of Zoom’s key features has unfortunately made it very easy to access Zoom conversations uninvited, and as such highlighted certain privacy risks. In this guide we will discuss some tips for making Zoom as safe as possible.

Prevent Zoombombing

All conversations in Zoom are assigned a unique Personal Meeting ID (PMI). This is a nine-digit number. Unfortunately, as Zoom has grown in popularity, a new spam phenomenon has emerged called “Zoombombing”. This means that spammers, hackers and other malicious parties can try to get into video conferences by entering random Meeting ID numbers. With this they can listen in on meetings and possibly collect private and confidential information. However, this doesn’t mean that you stop using Zoom. You can easily improve the privacy of your Zoom calls using the following steps below.

Use a Password

The quickest way to create an additional security filter is by adding a password. You can do this via both the mobile app, and the browser version of Zoom.

Go to Meetings , and select Edit.

, and select Once here, choose ‘Require meeting pass’.

Now enter a password of your choice

Use Waiting Room

The Waiting Room is a function in which participants are first placed into a virtual waiting room. As a host, you have full control over which users you want to give access to the conversation or not. This is how:

Select Admit (give permission) or Delete (don’t give permission.

If you have not already activated the waiting room feature, it is simple to do:

Go to Meetings > Edit > Advanced Options (only applicable in the desktop version), and select Enable waiting room

Remove Users From a Video Call

If for some reason an unwanted participant has entered your meeting, or if you want to remove a particular user for whatsoever reason, you can remove them. To do this:

Go to the Participants section during the meeting.

section during the meeting. Select the person that you want to remove, and choose the Remove option.

Lock The Meeting

If you have all of the desired collaborators connected to your video meeting, you can lock the conversation and stop any new users joining. In the desktop version of Zoom, this works as follows:

During the video call, go to Manage Participants and select More in the window that appears.

and select in the window that appears. Now select Lock Meeting

In the mobile app you can do this by tapping More at the bottom right of your screen. Then open the Meeting Settings and turn on the switch next to Lock Meeting.