Google Takes on ZOOM, now offering FREE Premium Video Calls
Now, Google Meet Online Video Conferencing offering a free Premium feature to all users. As we see, the Covid-19 pandemic is ongoing, and people are staying home to prevent the spread of the virus.
So, the company announces Google meet will be free, and adding 3 million new users a day.
We are now adding roughly 3 million new users each day and have seen a third-fold increase in usage since January. There are now over 100 million daily meet meeting participants, "Sundar Pichai, a Google CEO said.
Google said in its blog, Today, we’re making Google Meet, our premium video conferencing product, free for everyone, with availability rolling out over the coming weeks. We’ve invested years in making Meet a secure and reliable video conferencing solution that’s trusted by schools, governments and enterprises around the world, and in recent months we’ve accelerated the release of top-requested features to make it even more helpful.
Starting in early May, anyone with an email address can sign up for Meet and enjoy many of the same features available to our business and education users, such as simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to your preference, including an expanded tiled view.
It’s important that everyone who uses Meet has a secure and reliable experience from the start, so beginning next week, we’ll be gradually expanding its availability to more and more people over the following weeks. This means you might not be able to create meetings at meet.google.com right away,
Google said, approach to security is simple: make products safe by default. We designed Meet to operate on a secure foundation, providing the protections needed to keep our users safe, their data secure, and their information private.
Following Google Meet Safety measures:
- We provide a strong set of host controls such as the ability to admit or deny entry to a meeting, and mute or remove participants, if needed.
- We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts.
- Meet meeting codes are complex by default and therefore resilient to brute-force “guessing.”
- Meet video meetings are encrypted in transit, and all recordings stored in Google Drive are encrypted in transit and at rest.
- We don’t require plugins to use Meet on the web. It works entirely in Chrome and other modern browsers, so it’s less vulnerable to security threats.
- On mobile, we have dedicated Google Meet apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
- Meet users can enroll their account in Google’s Advanced Protection Program—our strongest protections available against phishing and account hijacking.
- Google Cloud undergoes regular rigorous security and privacy audits for all its services. Our global compliance certifications can help support regulatory requirements such as GDPR and HIPAA, as well as COPPA and FERPA for education.
- Your Meet data is not used for advertising, and we don't sell your data to third parties.
- We operate a highly secure and resilient private network that encircles the globe and connects our data centers to each other—ensuring that your data stays safe. Trust is built on transparency and we publish the locations of all our data centers.