Kitchener-based Tauria platform shines a light on video conferencing privacy

Video conferencing is a part of everyday life in 2021, whether it’s working at home, or video chatting with family members in a different city. Convenience and ease of use are two of the most sought-after features, but that can often lead to compromising another feature; privacy.

One Kitchener-Waterloo based platform is shining a light on privacy, especially when it comes to videoconferencing in the work at home era.

Jesse David Thé is the president of Tauria, which provides an alternative to Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. It boasts all the major features of those platforms, with an enhanced focus on privacy and encryption.

Thé said in the early days of the pandemic, users latched onto whichever program they could get a hold of to continue their daily tasks. It wasn't until later on that privacy and compliance became a concern for many.

“People were scrambling to find a solution, like Zoom or Google Meet, just so they could have something, because they needed something,” Thé said. “Now that a bit more time has passed, a lot of companies are starting to see a lot of the privacy and security issues with a lot of these solutions.”

On the back end, Tauria had been working on a videoconferencing feature for close to a year prior to launching in May 2020. The timing of it couldn’t have been more ideal, as office workers learned they’d be working from home for the foreseeable future.

Even working from a corporate computer or using VPN, users are still prone to security concerns. Using a platform like Tauria removes the guesswork by providing end-to-end encryption for video calls, chat, file sharing and scheduling.

This is critical in areas where personal data is of the utmost importance, like health care, government agencies, or the financial industry where sensitive data needs to be encrypted.

Platforms like Zoom and Google Meet are heralded for their ease of use, but Tauria purposely developed their program to be very user friendly as well. It’s as simple as clicking the invite and launching into a video call, without any external programs needed.

“You just click the link, you open Chrome, and you're in a call,” Thé said. “That took a lot of engineering to do. We wanted to make it seamless, because one thing is people will sacrifice privacy and security, even if they shouldn't, if it's convenient.

“We need to offer the privacy and security and try to make it as convenient to use as possible, so that way we ensure that everybody is safe.”

Zoom has been widely adopted, but the reports of “Zoom bombings” where video calls can get hacked were prevalent last year. Even the most recent example of a Texas lawyer’s “cat filter” incident illustrated the drawbacks on platforms like Zoom.

Tauria’s president warns the ripple effects of a potential cyber attack go far beyond a mere inconvenience of having someone in a video call who wasn’t invited to take part. Attacks come with real-world implications, as user's personal information could become exposed.

That data isn’t privy to the public, but the real-world implications run much deeper on the human level, which is why they developed a platform that focuses on encryption and privacy.

“There are a lot of externalities that can come from just the cyber attack that isn't in the news,” Thé said. “There's a huge amount of human damage to people's lives from something like that, that isn't in the headline.

“We know that it costs a million dollars, but we don’t know that it truly affected this person’s personal life and it caused them anxiety or depression; we don’t see that. That’s definitely something we want to try to prevent as much as we can, is that human damage.”

Like many in the industry, Thé views the work at home model to be a staple moving forward, but notes there are some positive side effects to working remotely. It allows employees to choose where they live, rather than let the proximity to the workplace dictate where they live.

And it also allows students to attend post-secondary education from other areas of Canada, and perhaps even other countries around the world. International students no longer have to uproot and move to Canada, they can attend classes online without having to leave their families.

The pandemic has fast-tracked the way people work and live today, and Thé is convinced there’s no going back to the old way of working.

If there’s one thing the quarantine period has taught us, it’s that the technology is available to allow people to work completely remotely. Many companies have foregone a traditional office and are focusing on a 100 percent work from home model.

“I think this is a massive revolution in the way that we all work,” Thé said. “That adds so much efficiency in the way that each of us live our lives. We have more time for the things that are outside of work, even.

“Now, if I'm done work, I can just close the laptop, and you can be with your wife or your kids or you can be with your girlfriend or relax, versus hopping in the car and driving home.”