In the last month of pandemic emergence made necessary for the most of people to work from home. Therefore a massive amount of new resources started being shared online with great pressure on the internet infrastructures worldwide.
For this reason a lot of interest was placed to file sharing services, video conferences systems and any other service that may allow working remotely and doing business without physical presence.
Privacy concerns
Zoom is therefore being requested because it allows to remote meetings, videoconferences, recording and video sharing. The request of such services has incredibly increased in the last weeks and zoom is the most known service in this sector. Zoom stocks price is then increased so much on the US stocks exchange. But is zoom the right solution? does it protect your security and privacy?
Maybe no. Many security and privacy problems have been discovered on that system:
Earlier last month, digital privacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pointed out a lot of very important problems on that platform. A meeting’s host had the ability to track participants through a special feature. Admins can also capture metadata as operative system, IP, location data and so on, for each participants. The bottom line is that you are putting a risk your privacy in a serious manner.
Jitsi as a privacy focused alternative
A great alternative is jitsi. jitsi is an open source software that can be installed on your server without third parties. It has several advantages compared to zoom. Some of them
- full opensource project, no backdoors, no hidden code
- to be installed on your server, you control your data
- attendees can access without registration, just by a simple link
- end-to-end encrypted to have the maximum privacy and security
- possibility to add an additional module to allow streaming to youtube and recording to mp4 local file
- highly customizable, with logo, text and colors
- good for work, deals, meeting, video conferences, interviews, streaming events and much more
- screen share available
- chat available
Jitsi is becoming the future of this kind of platforms because of offered features and opensource model.
There are companies offering this platform as preinstalled in their vps servers with customization features. Please see for example the swiss company Tritema, which provides simple and economical service for their clients, granting full control of data and privacy. A free version is also available.
So our suggestion is stay away from any threat to public privacy. We have really enough of companies trying to get, process, store and sell our data. We have to increasing usage of open source softwar alternatives.
