“In some conference calls you can remotely activate the microphones of participants. You can understand why the organiser might want to adjust the microphone of someone on the other end, but they could hear all sorts of things in a home environment.”
Another issue is the need for audit trails, says Palmer, which are crucial in areas such as financial services.
“A lot of these tools are about file sharing and instant messaging, as well as video communication: do you know who is talking to whom, when and what about? Because normally you’d have that record for six years in financial services.
“If you’re going to keep a record of video calls, where is that data going to be stored? If not, how are you going to deal with regulation and compliance? We’re now having a big uptake of these tools without going through normal due diligence.”
Work still to do on improving user experience
Chris Wallis, founder and CEO of cyber-security firm Intruder Systems, says he expects virtual reality (VR) to play a big part in future conferencing.
“When you have more than one or two people on a conference call the whole thing can descend into a mess. New VR developments could put us virtually into a meeting room. You’d be able to see visual cues on who was about to talk, without the solution choosing who it thinks is the speaker and muting feedback from other participants.
“I was on a video call the other day with 40-odd people and it was annoying with microphones feeding back, so the industry has work to do to improve the experience.”
“Deep fake” audio and video techniques are a future security threat, Wallis says, because criminals could, for example, pretend to be a chief executive ordering an employee to transfer money to a certain bank account.
Bob Nicolson, head of consultancy at cyber-security specialists Nicolson Bray, says the dangers are exacerbated by the likelihood of a massive shift to online meetings.
“[At the beginning of the year], you’d have a face-to-face sales meeting, but a lot of organisations will now look to videoconferencing for that and for internal meetings and will reduce their spending on travel. There’s going to be a shift.”
Nicolson says Zoom could look to Microsoft’s success in overcoming its own security problems in the early 2000s.
“There’s no reason why an organisation like Zoom with a much smaller product set can’t reinvent themselves.”
Meeting the needs of disabled users
Dr Marion Hersh, senior lecturer in biomedical engineering at the University of Glasgow, says it is crucial that providers keep the needs of disabled users in mind as they develop new products.
“If you’re disabled you might be using assisted technology or doing things slightly differently, so service providers need to remember that,” Hersh says, noting that technologies to overcome some of the barriers facing disabled people are not always accommodated by conferencing services.
“There should be audio as well as audiovisual options, preferably from a phone as well as a computer. Designers should follow web content accessibility guidelines and the links and controls need to have a text version and not just be graphical because that excludes people who use screen readers or have graphics turned off.”
Conferencing technology can exclude people if it requires fast response times, Hersh says. It should also support captioning, “but this cannot be totally automatic, or accuracy will be poor.
“Moving meetings online could improve accessibility for many people but this shift is happening so quickly there has been little time to think about how to meet the needs of different types of users and what training is required.”
