VIU Zoom Now Hosted in Canada 

CIEL has been working with Zoom to move all of our data storage and processing to servers located within Canada to better comply with BC’s FIPPA legislation. We are excited to announce that as of June 11, 2020, all accounts under VIU’s institutional license will have all of the data related to their meetings and accounts stored and processed within Canada. 

Please Note: This change only applies to meetings hosted by someone whose account is under VIU’s license for Zoom. If you are joining a meeting scheduled by someone outside of our VIU community, your data may be stored and processed outside of Canada.

What about people connecting from outside Canada?

All data processing and storage done by Zoom will happen within Canada regardless of where a user is located. Data sent from Canada will be encrypted (using AES 256-bit GCM encryption) until it reaches the end user’s device. 

If a participant wants to call in using a phone, rather than internet connection, to join the meeting, they can only call the Canadian phone number. This will result in long distance charges for anyone phoning in to a meeting from outside of the local calling area for the Canadian numbers. 

Profile Picture Control 

Meeting hosts can disable participants from showing profile pictures or prevent them from changing their profile picture during meetings. You can change this setting in your account settings and it will apply for all meetings.

Users with Zoom accounts can set a profile picture which will display when a user doesn’t turn on their video. If the user has no profile picture, or you disable profile pictures, you will see a black background with the user’s name in white instead of any profile picture.

New Encryption Icon 

You may notice a new green shield icon in the upper left corner of your Zoom meetings. This new icon is there to indicate your meeting is secure and encrypted. You can click on this icon to open a Statistics page in your Zoom settings which provides additional details about your meeting’s encryption. 

Report a User Feature 

Zoom has added a new feature of hosts and co-hosts in a Zoom meeting that allows you to report a problematic or abusive user to Zoom. Under the Security button within the meeting, hosts and co-hosts can choose Report a User to send information to Zoom’s Trust & Safety team for review. Read more about this feature here.  

Please note: Information reported to Zoom will be sent outside of Canada. 

Coming Soon: Password or Waiting Room Will Be Mandatory for All Meetings 

As part of the ongoing project to improve security of the Zoom platform, Zoom is planning to enforce a requirement that all meetings make use of either a meeting password, or enable the Waiting Room. Zoom has not yet announced the date they will enforce this change. Meetings that were scheduled prior to Zoom enforcing this change will have the waiting room enabled by default if the meeting does not have a password. 

The Waiting Room prevents users from entering the meeting room until specifically admitted by the host. You can learn more about the Waiting Room here. 

Meeting Passwords are automatically built into the meeting link. Anyone joining by clicking your meeting link will not be required to enter a password. If participants are joining the meeting by phone or by entering the meeting ID into the Zoom app, they will need to enter the password. If you are allowing participants to join by phone, please make sure to use a numeric password. All passwords must be at least 6 characters long. 

Have Questions?

If you have any questions about Zoom or anything in this post, please email us at learnsupport@viu.ca