Zoom Best Practices

Zoom Best Practices for Securing Meetings

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most UNBC employees are now working from home. Finding the most suitable service(s) to replace our in-person meetings and presentations is integral to continued collaboration and productivity.

Please use the following Best Practices in order to safely secure a Zoom meeting.

  • Use passcodes on all your meetings.  See Resources and Training for steps to add a passcode. Effective September 27 all meetings will require this.
  • Do not record your meetings - unless there's a good reason to do so. UNBC has enabled cloud recording if you want to do that. Use this feature with caution. See link below for best practices on recording. For support on this please email privacy@unbc.ca.
  • Do not export your chat logs - but if you do, remember that private messages, that you send or receive from others will be part of the history.
  • Lock your meetings when all the expected participants have joined the meeting. Doing so in conjunction with a password protecting your meetings will virtually eliminate "zoom bombing"
  • Require people to be authenticated to join meetings
  • Do not allow anyone who is not the Host(s) to share screens
  • It is possible to create a waiting room, where people who want to enter the meeting must wait until the presenter admits them
  • Do not share Zoom links publicly
  • Consider restricting Chat features, to prevent use of animated GIFs and other similar files, by disabling file transfers

Zoom Resources and Training

Visit Zoom and the Resources offered

Recording your Zoom Meeting

Important Notes regarding recording:

  • When recording a meeting or course activities, ensure you are considering whether the value of recording the meeting offsets the privacy risk to the participants.
  • Only record if you need to achieve your goals for a meeting or course activity, do not record just in case you may use it.
  • If you are recording a meeting, you must follow existing process from the Information Governance Office including recording class protocols and the appropriate collection and management of informed consent before the recording commences.
  • If you need help navigating privacy practices when recording using Zoom, including consent management, please contact privacy@unbc.ca for support.  Failure to manage privacy and consent properly, while recording using Zoom, may result in the loss of access to this system.

Helpful Tips on Recording:

  • As a meeting host you will be able to set security settings on your Cloud Recordings. To get more information please visit the UNBC Zoom information webpage and the new link labelled Recording Your Zoom Meeting. It is located above.
  • UNBC Zoom users are able to self-manage their own recordings.  Recordings can be deleted when needed, in addition the recordings will be automatically deleted 1 year after they were recorded.
  • Reminder - Recordings can be saved to your local machines, however the file sizes and post-meeting processing can take a long time depending on the age of the machine.
  • As well, instructors have the option to take that local recording and make it securely available in their learn.unbc.ca MyMedia areas as well.  That MyMedia area is the Kaltura media server bc.net/service-catalogue/kaltura.
  • Regardless of the recording location the same consent management rules apply.

Zoom Backgrounds for UNBC

Bruce Schneier on Zoom Security and Privacy

This blog post from Bruce Schneier should go a long way toward addressing the concerns regarding Zoom security and privacy. Schneier is a very highly regarded expert on cryptography, information security, and privacy. He wrote a piece about Zoom a while back, but this is a more recent assessment. He sums it up with, "Finally -- I use Zoom all the time. I finished my Harvard class using Zoom; it's the university standard. I am having Inrupt company meetings on Zoom. I am having professional and personal conferences on Zoom. It's what everyone has, and the features are really good."  In IT security, there are few voices that carry more weight than Schneier's.