Online meetings have become an integral part of daily life in many businesses, goverments and often even in private contexts. The underlying technology that allows for this type of browser based communication is called Web Real-Time Communications, or just WebRTC for short. It is an open source web standard that virtually all software, that delivers audio and video communication over the internet, builds upon.
Be it Skype, Teams, Zoom, Discord or Slack, all these software adopted this open standard, but have since decided not to inform the user on how the standard is implemented and how the audio and video streams are possibly used outside of the main goal of communicating. It is certainly difficult to completely trust software whose inner workings are a secret to anyone but the company. The issue of trust is significantly reinforced in this time of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where seemingly every Big Tech corporation is in an arms race to develop the best Large Language Model (LLM) – to which end they need copious amounts of data – your data. While you could closely study the entirety of, say, Microsofts Terms of Service – which seems to mutate every week – there is another option.
Some online communties have adopted the WebRTC standard and used it to build robust software that has been published as open source. This not only means that the software is transparent, but it also means that it can be self-hosted. No terms of service. You set the terms. One such software package is Jitsi Meet, a flexible set of tools that allow for truly free online communication. While Jitsi handles communications exceedingly well, the toolbox has seen some need for an authentication layer, in which participants can identify themselves, through trusted means. To this end, Semaphor has developed Conventu, a GDPR compliant hosting package that includes not only Jitsi, but an authentication framework built by Semaphor on top of the Jitsi.
Our framework delievers on two key fronts: Firstly, we can easilty integrate with virtually any employee database – such as ADFS, Notes, Keycloak and so on – which allows you and your coworkers to easily use the software with your existing credentials, even with automatic sign in through SSO. Second, we have made it possible to use the Danish authentication standard MitID as a means of authentication. This allows for case handling that can be carried out online, as caseworkers can be sure that they are indeed communicating with the appropriate citizen.
Our hosting package delivers a minimal-friction, secure, and GDPR-compliant alternative to software that lives of your data. Feel free to contact Semaphor for more information, or for a free demo.
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