Jitsi Meet, the private and anonymous alternative to Zoom, has just killed off its most popular feature: anonymity.

Jitsi Meet has been a popular video conferencing option for journalists, activist, and many others for whom anonymous operation was a critical feature. The service allowed users to start and join video conferences without requiring an account, an option that is unfortunately disappearing, according to a company blog post:

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 for starters but may modify the list later on). This is a first for us, so users may encounter a few bumps here and there as we are tweaking the experience to make sure there is as little friction as possible on the way into a meeting.

8×8, the developers behind Jitsi Meet, say the decision is the result of significant abuse of the platform by bad actors:

Earlier this year we saw an increase in the number of reports we received about some people using our service in ways that we cannot tolerate. To be more clear, this was not about some people merely saying things that others disliked.

Over the past several months we tried multiple strategies in order to end the violations of our terms of service. However in the end, we determined that requiring authentication was a necessary step to continue operating meet.jit.si.

How does this impact user privacy on meet.jit.si?

It is a good time to have a look at our privacy terms. 8×8 will now store the account responsible for creating rooms. Aside from the changes to our privacy terms referenced above, there is no other change to our meetings. We are still very much committed to holding user privacy in the highest regard and we still have no tools that would allow us to compromise the privacy of the actual audio or video content of a meeting, nor do we intend to create any.

8×8 says users that want to avoid these changes can still host their own private instance of Jitsi Meet.