This Unusual Zoom Setting Can Make Your Private Snapshots Public
Nowadays, everyone uses Zoom-ing, unless you prefer one of the reliable alternatives to a meeting solution with a permanent virtual background. And while you’ve probably heard a little about how a Zoom meeting organizer can tell if a Zoom window on your computer is out of focus when sharing a screen, there is another Zoom and privacy-related “feature” you should probably understand. … before the next virtual meeting.
Zoom offers the ability for any member to save the public chat of any meeting they are in. This is very useful if there are things you need to grab from the text chat, such as any notes or ideas that people dropped while someone was talking.
However, there is one catch: if you save the chat locally, Zoom will also save any private chats you had with anyone else in the meeting. And if you blindly copy and paste that chat log into, say, an email or a shared server, everyone can read what you think of your idiot boss or that the speaker hangs up the phone (assuming you typed this ).
It’s not as awful as it sounds: if you save a chat from a meeting, Zoom will only save the private chats you participated in, not the private chats that anyone else had during the meeting. What’s more, this universal save only happens when you save chats locally (or enable automatic saving of chats in Zoom settings ). If you use Zoom’s cloud recording features and enable the option to save chat through them, as detailed in the Zoom support document , Zoom only stores “chats that were sent to everyone and messages sent while recording in the cloud.”
So, as far as I understand, Zoom will still save the private chats you participated in, but only with cloud recording enabled. Silver lining, right?
It almost fits in with “this is common sense, right?” bucket, but here’s the thing: if you’re in a video conferencing, Slack, or whatever, pretend whatever you send can be seen by someone else, even if you think it’s personal .
In the case of Zoom, this means that you better not find fault with those who will close the call chat and read it later – yes. But you also might not want to spill your tea at all, because you never know if this log file might appear innocently, and when it will. Leave these comments “[boss name] is of course an idiot” on a separate platform if needed; don’t tempt fate by sending them as a private message that can be logged if the recipient accidentally saves what they think is a public chat and only a public chat. Surprise! It’s over.