Consider Privacy During Recordings

We often say unguarded things when we think we are among people we trust. In this new era of everything happening remotely on video, we may drop our guard and be impolite, impolitic, or imprudent during a meeting that is being recorded.

There are also many kinds of meetings that are strictly private, proprietary, or confidential, and in the event they need to be recorded, much more care should be taken about the process.

Zoom provides disclosures and requires affirmative consent for recording in variety of ways:

• Confirm via dialog: Zoom shows a dialog box that requires a response whenever a host or other party records a meeting. See Enter a Meeting for more particulars about what participants see.

• Spoken alert: An automatic spoken alert about the recording plays as well, though you can control that alert in the account settings for recordings: you can opt to limit the spoken alert to just people outside the Zoom account hosting the meeting or disable it altogether.

• Message at top of meeting: Zoom shows a message within their apps while a recording is in progress.

I suggest, in addition to the automatic disclosures, that you announce at the start of a meeting that it’s being recorded.

A host can provide some additional privacy and disclosure in meetings through these two options described in detail in the next section:

• Local recording: It’s wise to allow yourself to record locally, but disable the option “Hosts can give meeting participants permission to record locally” unless you have a specific reason for allowing it.

• Automatic recording: For some kinds of meetings or businesses, you may want to schedule a meeting to record as soon as it starts. Perhaps you have an internal, regulatory, or other obligation to record all meetings for later review. Or it’s easy to forget to start recording when managing the first stages of a meeting.

Set Options for Recording

Local and cloud recording mostly have overlapping options. Useaccount settings in the Recording options to turn local recording or cloud recording on or off for your account.

To configure settings, you use these locations by type:

• Local recording: Local recordings require a desktop Zoom app, where you can modify options in Settings > Recording. A couple of settings called out below are managed via a host in account settings.

• Cloud recording: Cloud recording can be managed in any Zoom app, and its options are found in account settings.

Local recording is limited to the amount of storage on a local device. You can set a folder where all recordings go. You can also select the “Choose a location” option and be prompted for a location after the meeting is over, although the default location appear first (pending any utilities that affect how your computer presents its Save dialog).

Cloud recording, available only for paid tiers, has online storage limits tied to the tier. Pro users get 1 GB of storage (about four hours of audio and video); Business, Enterprise, and Education Zoom One accounts get more and can pay for more.

Here are the settings you can configure for recording, noted in parentheses if the setting is limited to local or cloud (items appear in a slightly different order in their respective settings):

• Record audio separately: If a host or participant with permission to record selects “Record a separate audio file of each participant,” Zoom records both a file containing the sum of all audio and one for each participant with the audio quality as received on the machine recording. The resulting files can be edited and mixed for a podcast or other purposes later in an audio editor. (You can opt to omit the combined file in cloud recordings.)

• Add a timestamp to the recording: I can’t see the utility in this, but there may be circumstances in which the precise time burned onto the recorded screen across an event is relevant.

• Display participants’ names in the recording: This can be useful in a meeting with many participants, allowing them to be more easily identified, or when a recording is shown to people who don’t know the speakers involved.

• Optimize for 3rd party video editor: Select this option, and Zoom produces a video file more easily used by video-editing software, as opposed to one that’s highly compressed for web hosting and internet streaming.

• Record video during screen sharing (local only): This option is confusingly named as video continues to record whether or not the box is checked. What it should say is “Record participant’s video during screen sharing.” Deselecting it puts the screen-sharing session into the video feed. Selecting it records just the participant’s video feed and not the screen-sharing session. However, selecting the option and the checkbox below it, “Place video next to the shared screen in the recording,” creates a side-by-side view in the local recording with the slide share and view of participants.

• Record thumbnails when sharing (cloud only): A thumbnail of the present is added to any screen-sharing recording.

• Save poll results (cloud only): Any polls conducted during a meeting that had their results shared are saved.

• Save chat messages (both, but local option is in account settings): Chat transcripts are deleted when a meeting ends unless you have “Auto saving chats” enabled in Meeting settings. This option saves chat text to cloud storage, too.

• Save closed caption as a VTT file (both, but local option is in account settings): Zoom includes an option at all tiers to use machine-learning-based live captioning. You can opt her to save those results in the VTT file format, a standard that embeds timestamps to add subtitles to video.

Make a Recording

With all those options in mind and your choices made, here’s how to record a session as a host, and how to enable a participant to record locally via their own copy of Zoom.

Make a Host Recording

Start recording with one of a few methods:

• In a desktop app without cloud recording enabled or available for the account, click Record.

• With a desktop app with cloud recording enabled, click Record and you can choose between local and cloud recording.

• In a mobile or web app with cloud recording enabled for the account, click or tap Record.

What’s captured varies by recording type.

Record Locally

In a local recording, what you see onscreen is what is recorded. If you change views or make other window changes during a meeting, that changed in the recording, too (Figure 116). (The Zoom interface elements are omitted, too.)

This includes pinning, a feature that usually lets you control your local view as a participant or host, as explained in Speaker View. Pinned panels are recorded to local video. Unlike a participant, who is limited to one pin, a host can pin up to nine video panels. (Pinning has no effect on cloud recording.)

The one exception to what-you-see-is-what-you-record happens when “Place video next to the shared screen in the recording” is checked in a desktop app, which puts the recorded view into side-by-side mode, even if that wasn’t the case in your viewing.

Record to the Cloud

With cloud recording, you can choose to capture one or more views simultaneously, one of its key advantages. You can opt to record as separate video files through checkboxes in account settings in the Recording options:

• Active speaker

• Gallery View

• Shared screen

• Active speaker combined with a shared screen

• Gallery view with a shared screen; when there’s a shared screen, the active speaker’s video panel is inset in the upper-right corner

Pause and Stop Recording

You can tap pause to temporarily halt recording and then resume it, or tap stop and the recording is done. Both local and cloud recording have to then process the video and audio into their compressed form. For a desktop app, you see a progress bar; for cloud recording, Zoom emails you when the recording is complete.

Use Resulting Audio and Video

The output of a recording session is distinctly different with local and cloud recordings.

Find Local Recording Output

At the end of a Zoom session, a desktop app with local recording enabled—whether the host’s or any participant’s—will begin converting the temporary media storage files Zoom wrote to a local drive into separate media files (Figure 117).

The process can take from a few seconds to tens of seconds per minute of a session. You can click Stop Converting, and later double-click the unconverted raw media, restarting encoding and extraction.

Zoom drops locally recorded files into a folder named with the date, time, meeting name, and Meeting ID. The folder contains some combination of an MP4 video file, an AAC (.m4a) audio file, and a text file. Each audio and video file has a randomly generated number inserted into it to ensure uniqueness. (There’s also a .m3u playlist file, which may not be very useful.)

If you’ve lost track of where the files are, in the Zoom desktop app’s main window, click the Meetings icon and then click the Recorded tab. Select any item in the list and click Open to reveal in its folder on the desktop. You can also play back video and audio from here or delete the recording files.

The folder path is preset to a user’s Documents folder on Mac and Windows, you can change it at Settings > Recording by clicking the displayed path following “Store my recordings at:” You can also click Open there to reveal the folder on the desktop.

If you chose to create a separate audio file for each speaker, or didn’t engage in chat, you see a different combination of files. With multiple audio files, a folder named Audio Record appears with one audio file for each participant, labeled with their name as it appeared in the Zoom meeting.