What is a privacy-aware cross platform free personal video-tele-conference app to host & join meetings of about a dozen participants discussing Great Books?

On 01/04/2020 11:36, nospam wrote:
In article , Your Name
wrote:

Zoom has already fixed the supposed Facebook issues in the latest
update

so what? it has other significant problems, plus the company is guilty
of fraud.

Provide evidence.

(not that it was sending any of your actual private details
anyway).

yes it definitely was.

Provide evidence.

In response to what Arlen Holder wrote :

Great Books no longer can meet at the local library so they asked me to
figure out a good teleconferencing app for about a dozen people, none of
whom are younger than about 75.

What is a privacy-aware cross platform free personal video-tele-conference
app to host & join meetings of about a dozen participants discussing Great
Books?

UPDATE

Good news.

While Zoom privacy issues have been outed in the past few weeks, along
those of Skype, Whatsapp, and others, we have settled upon Zoom for our
Great Books' meetings, even as we discuss books for longer than 40 minutes.

It turns out multiple members of the group have children and grandchildren
with professional and student Zoom accounts, which we have successfully
used much to our satisfaction for our first Great Books' teleconference.

We ran a few tests and then had a full blown meeting, which, wasn't without
hiccups, but which worked rather well. We even used these accounts for
family Easter gatherings using Zoom.

One hiccup is that plenty of people "worry" (in my opinion far too much)
about their "background", where the whole 'virtual background' is an idea
which works well for some but horribly for others depending on lighting
issues (e.g., ghosting in and out effects).

Others, surprisingly, don't seem to realize the front camera is pointed
perpendicular to the device, where we have a good survey of members'
ceiling fans and beam work with the member peering out of the corner of the
image.

We had to tell them to prop up the device almost perpendicularly, perhaps
using great books as the backstop, keeping the device as vertical as
possible (amazingly, people don't understand the camera is 90 degrees).

In addition, a simple password was added of "booksRgreat" which everyone
could remember, although if people wished to crash the meeting, if they're
polite, they'd be accepted wholeheartedly & treated accordingly (just as
with Usenet).

Also, we learned, belatedly, to have a 'show of hands' at the beginning of
each meeting, literally, where having everyone put out _both_ their hands
in front of them accomplishes two important tasks for the hoi polloi
o It ensures they're at least a few feet away from the device, and,
o It ensures the device is not constantly bouncing in their hands

Unfortunately, for the iOS tablets anyway, you could only see 3 rows of 3
in "gallery view" where we had plenty more than could fit on one screen, so
everyone was asking where "they" were.

Likewise, initially, we had tons of people forgetting to allow audio &
video, which are separate permissions, where some just couldn't get that
the audio had to be enabled manually (I don't understand people sometimes).

The green boundary around the person talking was not all that useful since
it was easy to tell who was talking from their voice, but if we hadn't
known each other for over 50 years, maybe that green boundary would have
been useful.

There were a host of other issues, but nonetheless, we pulled it off
without resorting to another method, e.g., Hangouts, Signal, Skype, Jami,
Jitsi, etc.

We also learned that the Zoom GUI is very different not only on each
platform, but on tablet versus phone versions (apparently), where we
learned that the very first thing we needed to do was get everyone to
change the setting so that the Zoom controls were permanently displayed.

Bear in mind in _many_ ancillary threads at about this time are discussed
_other_ video-teleconferencing applications such as Jami
https://jami.net/ & Jitsi https://jitsi.org & Signal , each of which
clearly is more privacy aware than is Zoom, but most people seem to be
comfortable with Zoom, so we have chosen to use these professional &
student accounts for now.

Other related threads with details we made use of appear to be:
o Need advice on video phone calling apps?, by T
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.mobile.android/M1qC825McRU/DW9-Z-QCAQAJ

o Which Zoom app, by The Real Bev
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.mobile.android/UgKcu8fsiE8

o Zoom audio problem, by pinnerite
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.mobile.android/0mc-j9faTWA/7ANi5p0wBQAJ

o Zoom shares your data with Facebook., by collector
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.mobile.android/plOmQt5g9Yc/gN-WUDqjBAAJ

o Odd Signal problem, by Piet
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.mobile.android/ZiVofZzFKx0/POyFfqYmAAAJ
etc.
--
Usenet is a public archive of useful polite technical discussions.

UPDATE:

We ran into, recently, a 100-person limit with Zoom at a library meeting
which used to be done in person (not Great Books but another meeting).

Also, Zoom seems to have updated its encryption recently...
o Zoom Upgrades Encryption Keys to What It Promised All Along
https://www.wired.com/story/security-news-roundup-zoom-upgrades-encryption-keys/

Specifically:
o Zoom Hits Milestone on 90-Day Security Plan, Releases Zoom 5.0
https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/22/zoom-hits-milestone-on-90-day-security-plan-releases-zoom-5-0/
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Together we can keep better informed than we can by sitting home alone.