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Comment by contrarian1234 | Hacker News Reader

Meet requires a Google account to attend a video call while Zoom does not. So if your hosting a meeting with strangers, using Meet is not user friendly.

At least personally I refuse to make a Google account bc it requires giving Google my phone number... But I know that's a bit of technoludditism in the current zeitgeist

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This is only true for meetings created with free gmail accounts. If use Google Workspace this limitation does not apply.

That's a shady tactic right there.

What's so shady about that? It's not like they're advertising a feature to free Gmail users only to up sell them to workspace?

Is this new? I have definitely joined Meets calls from my personal laptop and I don't have a personal Google account. This includes my last job interview, and, well, I got the job.

Perhaps it's meeting specific, or organization specific?

I read that if you have a business account then this limitation doesn't exist - but I've never had anyone send me a link that worked without a login

Ah, I can see how Google would do it like this.

You can join a Google Meet meeting without a Google account if the meeting creator enables the “Anyone with the link can join” setting, or if they accept you when you click the link.

https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9303069?hl=en&co=GENI...

It's been over 6 months since I've looked into this, so it's possible my info is out of date - but the “Anyone with the link can join” setting is only available to people with a paid Google business account. Nobody in my department had anything like that

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