Microsoft takes on Zoom by highlighting privacy and security features in Teams

Over the past week, most of people in the tech industry were discussing about the privacy and security issues around Zoom video conferencing solution. You can read a summary of it here. Due to these issues, some school districts in the US have started to ban the usage of Zoom for remote classrooms. The most credible alternative to Zoom is Microsoft Teams. Today, Microsoft published a blog post highlighting their approach to privacy and security in Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft listed down the following as the privacy and security controls available for video conferences in Teams:

• Meeting options: With meeting options, you can decide who from outside of your organization can join your meetings directly, and who should wait in the lobby for someone to let them in. PSTN callers will be joining via lobby. Meeting organizers can also remove participants during the meeting.
• Roles in a meeting: A meeting organizer can define roles in a Teams meeting that designate “presenters” and “attendees,” and control which meeting participants are allowed to present content in the meeting.
• Attendee consent for recording: All recordings of meetings are accompanied by a notice to attendees that a recording is taking place. The notice also links to the privacy notice for online participants, and the meeting organizer controls which attendees have the ability to record.
• Meetings recording access: Meeting recording access is limited to those people who are on the call, or invited to the meeting, unless the meeting organizer authorizes others to access the recording. Recordings are uploaded to Microsoft Stream and may be shared and downloaded according to permissions enabled by account administrators.
• Channel moderation and controls: Channel owners can moderate a channel conversation and control who is, and is not, allowed to share content in channel conversations. This helps ensure only appropriate content is viewed by others.
• Communication compliance: Communication compliance enables organizations to foster a culture of inclusion and safety by identifying and preventing negative behaviors like bullying and harassment.

In addition to the above controls, Microsoft offers several privacy commitments like the below. Microsoft Teams also meet more than 90 regulatory and industry standards.

• We never use your data to serve you ads.
• We do not track participant attention or multitasking in Teams meetings.
• Your data is deleted after the termination or expiration of your subscription.
• We take strong measures to ensure access to your data is restricted and carefully define requirements for responding to government requests for data.
• You can access your own customer data at any time and for any reason.

Check out the source link below to learn more about security and privacy features of Microsoft Teams.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVO9WJl5scs

Source: Microsoft