From meetings and parties to dates, we all live in videoconferencing apps now. But after a series of privacy and security snafus at Zoom, which has become practically synonymous with videoconferencing during the Covid-19 pandemic, many organizations and individuals are wondering what service is safest for our conversations.

Emil Ivov says you shouldn't have to trust anyone. Ivov is the creator of the open source text and video chat software Jitsi and head of video collaboration at 8x8, a company that acquired Jitsi in 2018. The firm sells services built on Jitsi's code, but still pays developers to maintain the open-source version.

Jitsi Meet is a videoconferencing application with handy features like the ability to password-protect your meetings or kick people off a conference. But what sets it apart from most well-known videoconferencing services is that it's free and can run entirely on your own hardware. You can download the video bridge software and use it to host videoconferences that friends and colleagues can join through their web browser. The parent company 8x8 can't snoop on your conversation because it doesn’t have access to your computer. And because it's open source, you can inspect the code to make sure there aren't any back doors. "We'd like you to trust us but you don't have to," Ivov says.

That was a big part of why the Italian company WeSchool incorporated Jitsi into its online classroom software. "Open-source solutions can help you see what's under the hood, which is especially relevant when you're dealing with underage students' security," says WeSchool CEO Marco De Rossi.

Not everyone wants to run their own video server or pore over source code. That's why people pay for 8x8's Jitsi-based Video Meeting service. Like most videoconferencing companies, 8x8 has seen a surge in interest since the Covid-19 pandemic. The company says its Jitsi-based 8x8 Video Meeting service now has around 13 million monthly active users, up from a few hundred thousand before March. That would put Video Meetings usage around where analysts believe Zoom was in late February.

An interloper to a Jitsi videoconference would see garble without the proper encryption keys. Courtesy of Jitsi

WeSchool switched from the open-source version of Jitsi, which WeSchool hosted itself, to 8x8’s cloud-based Video Meeting once the Covid-19 crisis started. "A huge number of students started connecting to the platform," De Rossi says. "We started working with 8x8 because they're good at planning big installations."