The following suggestions provided by central office have been implemented to protect your anonymity. If you set up your own Zoom meeting, please follow the instructions below.
ZOOM MEETINGS: PROTECTING ANONYMITY & DEFAULT SETTINGS
For Zoom users: With the rush to shift to online meetings, many of us did not take time to investigate what this meant to the spiritual foundation of our recovery – namely, anonymity. Now that online meetings are accessible, we want to pass on best practices for protecting anonymity. These have been curated from the membership and online resources.
The default Zoom settings run counter to AA’s spiritual foundation of anonymity. The meetings are publicly accessible and full names and faces are often displayed. Additionally, by default all Zoom meetings are recorded to the cloud. Turning that feature off is simple, fortunately.
There are other settings in the Meeting subtab that can also be adjusted, such as disallowing remote control of devices, file transfer, data sharing with Zoom, and screen sharing.
Here are some suggested settings for your meeting to use. Please note that most, if not all, of the settings below are NOT the Zoom default:
Go to: Settings > Recording and click off the Local and Cloud recording features.
In the Zoom Settings section, under the Meeting subtab:
Require Encryption for Third Party Endpoints
Disable Auto saving chats
Disable File transfer
Disable Feedback to Zoom
Disable Screen sharing
Disable desktop/screen share for users
Disable Remote control
Allow Virtual background (this is the Zoom default and allows the user to use a virtual background instead of the inside of their apartment, for example)
In the Zoom Settings section, under the Recording subtab:
Disable Local recording
Disable Cloud recording
Disable Automatic recording
We will update this page with additional information as we learn it and encourage you to share tips and tricks with us that we can include. And stay tuned for information on Seventh Tradition contributions.