Proton Meet adds new features to give more control to teams: waiting rooms & chat threads

Swiss privacy-focused company Proton has rolled out two significant enhancements to its Meet video conferencing platform, targeting organizations that prioritize both security and meeting efficiency. The newly launched waiting rooms and chat threads features are now available across various plan tiers, with both protected by the same end-to-end encryption that underpins all Proton Meet calls.

The waiting rooms' feature gives hosts granular control over meeting attendance, requiring all participants except the host to wait for admission before joining. This adds an important layer of access control to Proton's existing encryption protections, participants in the waiting room aren't part of the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) encryption group and cannot access meeting content until admitted. Notably, even Proton's servers cannot see who is waiting, as participant names remain end-to-end encrypted.

Alongside waiting rooms, Proton has introduced chat threads to address a common pain point in virtual meetings: disorganized conversation histories. The feature allows users to reply directly to specific messages, keeping related discussions contained without cluttering the main chat stream. Like all Meet communications, threaded messages, replies, and reactions are end-to-end encrypted, and chat exists only for the duration of the call with no server-side retention.