[casca]

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

[1] https://jitsi.org/

[rkuykendall-com]

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.

[User8712]

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

[rkuykendall-com]

From a subjective standpoint: perfectly.

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

[User8712]

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.

[tracker1]

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

[somesay]

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.

[chillingeffect]

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.

[sdfjkl]

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