I am not complaining about the name, I agree that is a legitimately required field, I'm complaining about the requirement to have a properly formatted email address as it is, essentially, useless to anyone except Webex/Cisco themselves.
The meetings I'm having aren't being transcribed or recorded, as well, the attendees may not want to receive them, however it isn't an optional field, so it makes me question Cisco/Webex for making this a mandatory field.
I am meeting with a variety of people including some non-tech-savvy people who don't like putting their email address out there and I don't want to give the instructions "put in your first name and a fake email address". Also, if there are recordings and transcripts going to those addresses, if you put in a random address you might be sending that information to random third parties, which could be very bad depending on the content. Additionally, if people enter any email address to get transcripts and replays of meetings, it could very easily get Cisco/Webex's email systems blacklisted as bad actors start to abuse this unsolicited email sending option in SPAMing, phishing, and other campaigns. Which makes me seriously question if the system currently sends anything to those addresses.
From a usability, security, and good internet denizen perspective transcripts, recordings, and on-demand requests should only be sent to email addresses which have been verified by everyone involved ie: people who have registered webex accounts, who are authenticated to their account, and whom I invited to the meeting using the same email address as their Webex account uses. Beyond that, anything else would be exploitable.
While some may argue that I could have a closed meeting and that only those with email addresses I have invited may enter this, too, would be a highly exploitable system as there's no checks on if that truly is the person they claim to be. Individualized URLs with tokens sent when I invite people from the WEbex UI would be a half measure, but forwarding the invite email or providing the URL to another person would defeat any protection specifying users in advance would afford.
Seeing as I haven't seen a way for I, as the host, to get a list of the email addresses for my attendees, Cisco/Webex can't even claim to be doing this for my benefit... so, Cisco/Webex, legitimately, have zero options for how to use those email addresses other than to try to advertise to those people or try to mine the attendee data for marketing or advertising purposes. Because I'm a paying customer, I don't want them to do that. If someone from Cisco/Webex wishes to refute this claim, please do so. I'd appreciate it even more if you tell me where you've hidden the option to disable this highly questionable "feature"; if there's no way to disable the prompt/requirement, I'll start looking to move to a different provider as this is, simply put, a show stopper.
