698 – Be safe while online: Tom talks Zoom Safety

Episode 698 – Zoom Safety
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 698 to Screw the Commute podcast? There's been a lot of hacks pointed toward Zoom, especially since Zoom skyrocketed to prominence during the pandemic. And today, I'm going to give you some of the best practices so you reduce your chance of getting compromised. And they've got a name for it. It's called Zoombombing. All right. So we don't want you to get bombed on Zoom. I hope you two miss Episode 697 that was on residual income, and this use of residual affiliate programs is what allows me to legitimately say I couldn't stop the money coming into my checking account if I tried. So anyway, that's what that podcast is about. And also that's what my TikTok is about. It's now past 555,000 views. All right. So this is a popular topic for recurring and residual income. So anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screw the CNNMoney.com and then slash and then the episode number that was 697 and today is 698. All right. How would you like to hear your own voice here on Screw the Commute? Well, if the show's helped you out at all in your business or giving you ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it at screwthecommute.com and look for a little blue sidebar widget that says send a voicemail, click on it talking to your phone or computer and tell me how the shows helped you and also put your website on there so I can give you a nice shout out. All right, Now make sure you pick up a copy of our automation e-book. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. It's your gift for listening to the show and it's a very serious book that'll save you hundreds and hundreds of hours of fighting with your computer.

[00:02:17] Now let's get to the main event. I mean, even if you're using Zoom regularly, there's probably some things that, you know, a lot of us just got thrust into using it and not really knowing exactly the pros and cons of doing it. So today I'm going to give you some ideas on keeping safe. Now, do I do all of them? No, simply because of the way I happen to use them most of the time. But you want to at least know about these things. So you say, Oh geez, I should do that to prevent zoombombing or something else bad from happening. So here we go. Let's see. So even if you're going to be doing large groups, try to avoid putting your meeting links and IDs on social media, send them directly to people through email or some more secure method because you don't want that stuff out there. It's just asking for trouble. And make your room private, not public. And you can even put a password on the meeting if if you need to.

[00:03:24] It makes it a little more hassle for the people. But there are ways that you can even embed the password into the link that you give them. So all of these things and there's tons of training on this, on online. So I'm just giving you the ideas here. So you say, Oh, that's perfect for me. I need to learn how to do that and then dig in and and figure it out. Zoom has lots of settings, so you have to make sure, I mean, one little check mark can ruin a whole meeting if you didn't have it. Have it on. Now, did you realize that once everybody is in the meeting, you can actually lock the meeting and and after you lock the meeting, it's a good practice. If there's if you have enough help to assign a co host in case someone that's not supposed to be there somehow gets past your safeguards and the co host can then kick them out while you're busy presenting. All right. Now, screen sharing. I think the default for screen sharing is the host only. And then you have to give permission to participants to share their screens. But a lot of people don't realize deep in the settings, you can control who and how many people can share. So there's been lots of stories about people sharing inappropriate things, and you don't want that to happen on your meeting. All right, use the waiting room feature. So if you enable the waiting room, that even adds more security, you people have to be let in and you see who they are and if they should be there or not.

[00:05:02] Also, there's a setting. Don't let anybody in until the host is there. So if you don't make sure that setting is appropriate, people can start loading themselves into the thing and you're not there. And then people can say and do bad stuff and or things that you don't believe should be done in your meeting and nothing you can do. Nobody can kick them out. See, so so make sure that you have to be there or the host has to be there first before anybody else gets in. Then you can set it so that all the participants are muted automatically when they enter. So this means you're not going to get just loaded with crazy background noises because somebody logged in to the meeting and then went to the bathroom and their dog's screaming or their kids are screaming. And then multiply this by lots of people and you got chaos. So have it set to mute participants on entry. And remind the participants of their backgrounds. I mean, frequently people zoom in from a coffee shop or some other place where there's either unwanted or or inappropriate distractions in the background. Now, another thing is set your audio and video off until you intentionally turn it on. I mean, you don't want to be embarrassed that you're picking your nose or thinking that the meeting hasn't started. You know, nobody's there yet and you're there doing things. And don't pull Jeffrey Toobin, if you don't know what that means.

[00:06:35] Look it up. He did. He was a CNN lawyer on CNN that did something really bad in a in a meeting. So check that out. You don't want that to happen to you. Here's another one that I didn't even know about till I started researching this. You can disable file transferring annotations and the autosave feature for chats. This again, if anybody somehow gets in or maybe is supposed to be in the meeting, but it's a little hostile, they can't share unauthorized information with the group through your chat and all that. So. Now, again, that's one of those things that might be more trouble than what it's worth. If you have a good group of people and you regularly meet with them. So I just want you to know the consequences of not doing or what could happen if you don't make some of these settings. And then do your updates for sure. See? See Zoom got. Just thrust into prominence so big with the pandemic, they couldn't keep up with the security. And that's where the Zoom bombing came in. People could find security breaches and exploit them and cause lots of trouble and inappropriate things and nasty things. So make sure you do your updates or set it for auto updating. And and like I said, many of the the updates are there for security reasons. So if you ignore that, you're asking for trouble. Now, another thing that could be a little hassle for you. I know I don't always do this, but. You have a personal meeting ID? And the best practice is not to use that all the time because it gets around and it because it just makes a security potential breach.

[00:08:29] So you can schedule a meeting and get a unique meeting ID for each meeting. You can generate it automatically and it'll make a unique ID for the personal meeting. And then and then you can have it assign a passcode for you and, you know, all kinds of things like that. So so there's there's probably even more than this. But this should give you an idea and hopefully whet your whistle that you should be thinking about these things. If you're using Zoom regularly because you don't want some important thing going on maybe with a client or prospective client and then something really bad happens and there goes your contract or your deal. So so check that out. And if you want help with this in a million other things that it takes to be successful online, check out our mentor programs. The longest running, most unique, most successful ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing. So check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. Also follow me at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire. And if you go over there please like you know share follow do all the kind of stuff that really helps helps it out. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. Be safe on Zoom.