What’s going on? Starting on August 24th, we will no longer support the anonymous creation of rooms on meet.jit.si, and will require the use of an account (we will be supporting Google, GitHub and Facebook […]
While Jitsi is open-source, most people use the platform they provide, meet.jit.si, for immediate conference calls. They have now introduced a "Know Your Customer" policy and require at least one of the attendees to log in with a Facebook, Github (Microsoft), or Google account.
One option to avoid this is to self-host, but then you'll be identifiable via your domain and have to maintain a server.
As a true alternative to Jitsi, there's jami.net. It is a decentralized conference app, free open-source, and account creation is optional. It's available for all major platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android), including on F-Droid.
Possibly stupid question: if they found out that people were doing illegal stuff on it, doesn't that mean that they were monitoring people's conferences? I thought that the FOSS community was big on privacy.
I imagine they're receiving reports from other parties, such as law enforcement, that there are inappropriate things happening, rather than monitoring the streams themselves.
Théry are plenty of FOSS people who don't believe in privacy. Just because you like openness in one thing doesn't mean you want it in another. Though there is probably a larger overlap.
That's just not true at all. You're talking from a very small circle if you think most OSS is used by privacy buffs. The largest users of OSS are companies, followed by techies who enjoy the challenge or the ownership. Privacy wonks are by far the smallest userbase.