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Zoom and other video conferencing software has enabled thousands of people to join our worship services from all over the world. Although such technology offers huge benefits for ministry and outreach, it also presents new security threats.

With recent unknown, anonomous individuals logging into Zoom church services recently within the British Union Conference and showing disturbing videos for all to see, necessary precautions need to be taken to safeguard everyone from these pornographic and racially slanted videos and images.

Whilst the Zoom platform still remains a viable method of conducting meetings and churches events, please follow the following saftey guidelines and the guidance from the Community Security Trust (CST) attached.

ZOOM Security points:

1. Ensure you are running the latest version of Zoom desktop. Currently 5.0.2

2. Schedule the church or group meeting on the web app for more security options. https://zoom.us

3. Allow 'Only authenticated users to join'.  This means people have to be signed in to Zoom in order to join the meeting.

4. Get participants to register for the meeting. That way they will have their own link in an email from Zoom and you will have the list of registrants and attendees.

5. Ask attendees to register for a Zoom account and update their account profile with their full name and ideally a photo.

6. Use the 'Report' option in the participants window if needed to report them directly to Zoom.

7. Toggle the participants videos to 'off' when organising the meetings. That means they won't be able to show their videos in the meetings.

8. Set up a new meeting each week rather than a recurring meeting.

9. Set up a separate WhatsApp or similar group for members, where only the Admins can post, and use it just for the zoom links.

10. Familiarise yourself with where the 'send to waiting room', 'Remove' and 'Report' options are located on Zoom.

Also see the Zoom list of settings from their website:

When hosting a meeting, Zoom settings has controls at your fingertips to ensure your meetings are secure and disruption-free.

• Security options in toolbar: Meeting hosts have a Security icon in the toolbar for quick access to essential in-meeting security controls. See it in action!
• Lock the meeting: When a host locks a Zoom Meeting that’s already started, no new participants can join, even if they have the meeting ID and password (if you have required one).
• Put participant on hold: You can put an attendee on hold and their video and audio connections will be disabled momentarily.
• Remove participants: From that participants menu, you can mouse over a participant’s name, and several options will appear, including “Remove”.
• Report a user: Hosts/co-hosts can report users to Zoom’s Trust & Safety team, who will review any potential misuse of the platform and take appropriate action.
• Disable video: Hosts can turn someone’s video off. This will allow hosts to block unwanted, distracting, or inappropriate gestures on video.
• Mute participants: Hosts can mute/unmute individual participants or all of them at once. Hosts can block unwanted, distracting, or inappropriate noise from other participants. You can also enable “Mute Upon Entry” in your settings, which is a good option for large meetings.
• Turn off file transfer: In-meeting file transfer allows people to share files through the in-meeting chat.

• Turn off annotation: You can disable the annotation feature in your Zoom settings to prevent people from writing all over the screens.
• Disable private chat: Zoom has in-meeting chat for everyone or participants can message each other privately. Restrict participants’ ability to chat amongst one another while your event is going on and cut back on distractions.
• Control screen sharing: The meeting host can turn off screen sharing for participants.
• Control recording: The ability to record to the cloud or locally is something an account admin can control. If they have recording access, the host can decide to enable/disable a participant or all participants to record.
• Do not allow participants to rename their ID: The host can disable the ability for participants to rename their onscreen identity.
• Turn on waiting rooms: The meeting host can turn on waiting rooms from within the meeting.

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