Anonymous questions and polls will now be allowed in Google Meet

In the past two years, Google has brought quite a few helpful improvements and new features to Google Meet, including the ability to ask questions and participate in polls. However, these actions could only be done while identifying yourself, which may not be ideal depending on the type of call you are in.

To address this, Google is adding the ability for meeting participants to perform these two tasks anonymously. According to Google, this has been a top requested feature as users wanted the option to be able to participate without having to give their names, especially on large calls where users don’t want to be called out. In addition, this can also help protect privacy when a meeting is open to the public or shared across the domains of more than one company.

When this feature is used, other participants, the meeting hosts, and Google Workspace Admins won’t know who used it. Google states that only they retain the poll response and anonymous question, then make them anonymous or erase them. Anonymous questions will be on by default but can be disabled by meeting hosts and co-hosts via Meeting Activities > Allow Questions in Q&A > Allow Anonymous questions. Anonymous polls, however, will be off by default and can be turned on by hosts and co-hosts when first sharing the poll. Availability of these features is limited to the below Google Workspace tiers:

Q&As

​
• Available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Starter, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Teaching and Learning Upgrade, Education Plus and Nonprofits, as well as legacy G Suite Business customers.
• Not available to Google Workspace Business Starter, Education Fundamentals, Education Standard, Frontline customers, or legacy G Suite Basic customers

Polls

​
• Available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Starter, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Teaching and Learning Upgrade, Education Plus and Nonprofits, as well as legacy G Suite Business customers.
• Also available to Google Workspace Individual users.
• Not available to Google Workspace Business Starter, Education Fundamentals, Education Standard, Frontline customers, or legacy G Suite Basic customers.

Google Workspace Updates

For those eligible, anonymous questions and polls will be rolling out to Rapid and Scheduled release domains on July 19, 2022, although it may take up to 15 days for visibility. They also have no admin control, as these will be up to the meeting host and co-host. Hopefully, this encourages meeting attendees to participate more often. However, I could see companies wondering about how this could be abused by a disgruntled employee and being able to find the origin of the anonymous message. Even though Google says this information is anonymized, I still wouldn’t get any funny ideas about testing this.