According to the company, anonymous questions will be available by default in all meetings. However, meeting hosts and co-hosts can disable the feature by going to Meeting Activities > Allow Questions in Q&A > Allow Anonymous questions. So, make sure to check the settings before you put up that question you won’t ask publicly. Anonymous polls, on the other hand, are off by default. Meeting hosts and co-hosts will have to manually enable it when sharing a poll if they want to let participants respond anonymously. It’s a simple toggle that appears on the screen as shown below. It will make the names and answers of the respondents anonymous. If you’re a host or co-host, note that the settings don’t carry over from meeting to meeting. So regardless of whether anonymous questions and polls were enabled/disabled for the last meeting, the settings will revert to default for the next meeting. You will have to manually configure them for every meeting. Google says the ability to ask questions or respond to polls anonymously can “encourage greater participation” from meeting attendees. Perhaps it has been a “top request” from Google Meet users. These features also help protect privacy in public meetings. It’s worth mentioning here that while anonymous questions and poll responses will hide your identity from other meeting participants, the hosts, and your Google Workspace Admin, and Google will retain your questions and response. The company will anonymize or delete the data at a later time.
Google Meet is rolling out support for anonymous questions and poll responses
The new Google Meet features are now rolling out to users on both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains. The rollout began this Tuesday, July 19, and may take up to 15 days for the features to show up for all eligible users. There is no admin control for these features. According to Google, support for anonymous questions and poll responses will be available to most Workspace customers, including Workspace Essentials, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Starter, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Teaching and Learning Upgrade, Education Plus, Nonprofits, and legacy G Suite Business customers. Anonymous polls are also available to Google Workspace Individual users. Workspace Business Starter, Education Fundamentals, Education Standard, Frontline, and legacy G Suite Basic customers miss out on both.
