A naked man ruined a school video class's group chat, teaching a valuable lesson about the importance of privacy settings in online settings. The world is attempting to continue as much of "normal" life as possible while practicing social distancing to combat the coronavirus, and that means an increased reliance on video chatting. If we're going to use video chats more often, we need to be vigilant with our settings and aware of the risks. Creeps use the internet, too.
Many video conferencing apps like Zoom have the option to open a video meeting to anyone with the meeting's ID. It's a process similar to the link-sharing tools in Google Docs or Google Drive and, like link-sharing, it can be as risky as it is convenient. The option to just send a code is great because it eliminates the need to collect emails and do manual invitations, but the trouble comes in when unintended people get ahold of that ID.
In this particular instance, a Norwegian school was using the Whereby app for a video lesson. According to Norwegian state broadcaster NRK, a man exposed himself to a group of young girls after hijacking their video chat. Whereby's Product and Technology Manager, Ingrid Ødegaard, says the man most likely gained access to the chat by guessing numerous room IDs until he found the correct one, which is apparently a common practice (again, creeps).
Video Chats Highlight the Importance of Privacy Settings
As one would expect, Whereby apologized about the incident but the school has decided to move classes to a different platform. Ødegaard pointed out that Whereby does assist any educational organization that reaches out to them with establishing a system for online courses, giving them secure servers and teaching them how to handle privacy settings, but this school never reached out. So, as is typically the case, the problem was a user being too trusting of the internet and ignoring an online platform's privacy options. To its credit, rather than place the onus on schools entirely, Whereby does ban people for specifically looking for rooms to "crash" and will block IP addresses of offending parties even if there are no user complaints.
Given Zoom's spike in popularity, its similarities to Whereby, and the rise of video chatting during our coronavirus distancing, it's an unfortunate reality that these sorts of incidents happen all the time. Recent trends like Zoombombing are scary, but avoidable problems if people take the time to read through settings rather than haphazardly embrace the most convenient invite options. Just be mindful of the creeps, people.
Source: NRK (via TechCrunch)