Video Conferencing

Video conferencing is now a practical application of technology that is increasingly central to our lives, particularly during times of isolation and lockdown. Our case study into video conferencing takes a strong technological perspective to explore how various technical decisions, based on different sets of values, impact a person’s safety and privacy. Using the Public Stack layers we see the conflicting considerations in for example a peer-to-peer configuration where we can have more control and options to address important values such as privacy, where a client-server configuration feature richness and ease of use might be easier to achieve, but control and privacy might suffer, especially if the server is managed by an organisation we cannot trust.