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Comment by casca | Hacker News Reader

Amusingly, with Hangouts down, Skype video chats have become unusable. Time to move to Jitsi[1]?

The nice thing about WebRTC is that video chat services have exploded. I've been using https://appear.in/ lately. It couldn't be simpler to start group video chats.

How do these typically compare to Skype or Hangouts in terms of video and sound quality?

From a subjective standpoint: perfectly.

From a technical standpoint: I believe Hangouts is moving to WebRTC soon as well.

What about from a security standpoint? How safe are these web applications, and how confident can I be they're not logging audio or video from my calls? I'm not talking about government intelligence security, I'm talking about not appearing in my pajamas on the pirate bay.

If both parties can get a raw socket in, then it's peer to peer... otherwise it's via proxy.

I would say, you always have to trust the service provider. While you can manually verify a direct end-to-end connection etc., web apps could always easily change, without user notice. Well, but that's also true for any proprietary app that isn't open source and code-reviewed.

It could be a browser feature in the future to sandbox those webcam data so that it's only transfered to a specific opponent. That has some problems to solve and is just a raw thought.

for those like me :) to whom it's not obvious: how come?

Skype is from Microsoft and Hangouts is from Google, right?!

Thank you for your patience in the face of my utterly stunning cluelessness.

High time, if you value privacy (use ZRTP). Or open standards.

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