Anonymous users can no longer join education meetings on Google Meet

The feature is being gradually rolled out to G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education customers and will take up to 15 days for complete visibility, the company said in a blog post on Monday.

As online learning is becoming the new normal in the COVID-19 era, Google Meet has introduced a new security feature that, by default, blocks anonymous users or the users not signed in to a Google account from joining education meetings organized by G Suite for Education users.

With this new feature, participants will no longer be able to share a meeting link publicly which will help increase the privacy of education meets in the video-communication platform. However, G Suite for Education admins can contact G Suite support to request an exception for disabling this feature to allow anonymous participants to join Google Meet calls. If disabled, it will enable meetings organizers to allow anonymous users to join meetings in their domain.

The feature is being gradually rolled out to G Suite for Education and G Suite Enterprise for Education customers and will take up to 15 days for complete visibility, the company said in a blog post on Monday.

The new release seeks to deal with unauthorized users who can cause disruption to online learning by making noise and sharing content, aka zoombombing. Prior to Google Meet, Zoom also deployed additional security features to ensure online meetings are secure and disruption-free.