While Jitsi is open-source, most people use the platform they provide, meet.jit.si, for immediate conference calls. They have now introduced a “Know Your Customer” policy and require at least one of the attendees to log in with a Facebook, Github (Microsoft), or Google account.
One option to avoid this is to self-host, but then you’ll be identifiable via your domain and have to maintain a server.
As a true alternative to Jitsi, there’s jami.net. It is a decentralized conference app, free open-source, and account creation is optional. It’s available for all major platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android), including on F-Droid.
Possibly stupid question: if they found out that people were doing illegal stuff on it, doesn’t that mean that they were monitoring people’s conferences? I thought that the FOSS community was big on privacy.
I imagine they’re receiving reports from other parties, such as law enforcement, that there are inappropriate things happening, rather than monitoring the streams themselves.
No, because we don’t know how they got the information. Someone might as well just have reported it, or it was forwarded from law enforcement.