Zoom Debuts New Tools to Fight Meeting Disruptions

Zoom has released two new security features to help meeting hosts and cohosts remove and report disruptive participants. It has also developed the At Risk Meeting Notifier, which scans social media sites and public resources for Zoom meeting links and notifies the account owners.

The Suspend Participant Activities feature, located under the Security icon, will let hosts and cohosts temporarily pause a Zoom call and remove a disruptive attendee. During this pause, all audio, video, in-meeting chat, annotation, screen sharing, and recording will stop, Zoom says.

As part of the process, hosts will have an option to report the user from their meeting, share details, and include a screenshot if they wish. When a report is submitted, the reported user is removed and Zoom's Trust & Safety team is alerted. The paused meeting may then resume.

The feature is enabled by default for all free and paid Zoom accounts. 

Another new feature, Report by Participants, lets meeting attendees report disruptive users in the Zoom interface by clicking the Security badge. Account owners and admins may control reporting for attendees in web settings. Both new features are now in Zoom desktop clients for Mac, PC, Linux, and mobile apps. Support for the web client and VDI will arrive later this year. 

Zoom's At-Risk Meeting Notifier is meant to protect Zoom meeting links from appearing on the public Web. The tool scans public posts on social media websites and other public resources for Zoom meeting links; if it finds a meeting's information available on the Web, an email is sent to the account owners and admins so they can remove or report the post and schedule a new call.

The videoconferencing platform has come under intense scrutiny this year as people around the globe use it to work and stay in touch with friends and family. Zoom has taken several steps to strengthen user security: It recently announced the rollout of end-to-end encryption to free and paid users; earlier this year, it decided to bring two-factor authentication to all users. 

Read Zoom's blog post for more details.