Google Steps Up Meet Security, Prohibits Anonymous Users from Joining meetings

This spring, when the world was just getting familiar with videoconferencing platforms, security quickly became a big issue.

Unauthorized users were gaining access to video calls and disrupting meetings, conferences, and classes. With children involved, security for the educational use of videoconferencing became very important.

Many school districts banned the use of Zoom because of the application’s security lapses that allowed bad actors to access meetings and display crude content. Zoom has since fixed those issues and many schools now allow for the use of Zoom.

Google Meet is particularly popular for educational use since it is built into the G Suite platform that is employed heavily by U.S. school districts.

Now, Google is prohibiting anonymous users from joining meetings organized by someone with a G Suite for Education or G Suite Enterprise for Education license, according to a recent G Suite blog.

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. Note, this does not prevent users from dialing in by phone.

What IT admins and end users need to know

According to Google, there is no admin for this feature. G Suite for Education admins can request to have the feature disabled to allow anonymous people to join calls by contacting G Suite support, but the feature will be on my default.

Google began rolling out the feature on July 13 and will continue to do so for about two weeks.

Now, teachers won’t have to worry about students sending meeting links to their friends for a prank or unauthorized users from joining the meeting and disrupting the class.

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