Jitsi is a set of open-source projects that allows you to easily build and deploy secure videoconferencing solutions. At the heart of Jitsi are Jitsi Videobridge and Jitsi Meet, which let you have conferences on the internet, while other projects in the community enable other features such as audio, dial-in, recording, and simulcasting.
Zoom, the popular-by-necessity video conferencing platform, has seen an explosion in users as the coronavirus pandemic forces people to work from home.
But with that increase in users has come greater scrutiny of Zoom’s privacy and security. With widespread reports of Zoombombing (where strangers dial in your channel with something rude and disruptive), the company’s procedures have been called into question by the New York Attorney General, and prompted a class-action lawsuit.
Zoom has been criticized for ignoring privacy before. A year ago, a researcher found that 4 million Zoom user cameras were potentially vulnerable to remote takeover without you knowing.
Several people who build and develop privacy-oriented tools recommend Jitsi as a more secure alternative to Zoom.
Emil Ivov, one of the founders of Jitsi, said what sets it apart from other video conferencing services is that it’s low friction. Creating a meeting is as simple as typing your name in, and it’s just one click to join. The company uses WebRTC, or Web Realtime Communications, which enables peer to peer video, data, and audio communication between two web browsers. So on desktops there are no downloads and no accounts needed, said Ivov.
“We are really mindful about privacy and security,” said Ivov. “We require no personal data and fully support anonymous use. We are also open source. This is where we are truly unique. If you have any concerns about how we run our service, then you can just go and run your own! It only takes 15 minutes.”
Being open source also means anyone can scrutinize its software. But Jitsi does not feature end-to-end encryption.
“For now this is simply not possible with WebRTC, although the whole community is looking into the problem and we are hoping there will soon be solutions,” said Ivov. “For the time being, however, all your data is encrypted in-flight using DTLS-SRTP [a protocol which adds encryption and ensures message authentication and integrity] as per the WebRTC standard. None of your media content eaves your computer unencrypted.”
Features:
- Unlike other videoconferencing technologies, Jitsi Videobridge, the heart of Jitsi, passes everyone’s video and audio to all participants, rather than mixing them first.
- The result is lower latency, better quality and, if you are running your own service, a much more scalable and inexpensive solution.
- Jitsi is compatible with WebRTC, the open standard for Web communication.
- Jitsi supports advanced video routing concepts such as simulcast, bandwidth estimations, scalable video coding and many others.
- Ubuntu and Debian packages for easy installation
Jitsi is a favorite videoconferencing solution for anyone with privacy concerns, journalists, for example. There’s a reason so many people use Jitsi Meet as a Skype alternative for video conferencing. Try it out and download it for free.
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