This article is for Education edition users. Other users can go to Meet security and privacy.
Google Meet has many features to help protect your data and safeguard your privacy. For Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals and Google Workspace for Education Plus editions, there are additional relevant features to keep your school meetings secure and private. Follow the tips outlined below to optimize the Meet deployment for your domain.
To find the latest updates to Meet, Classroom, and other education products, see What’s new in Google Workspace.
Google Meet Security
With Google Meet, schools can take advantage of the same secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in protection, and global network that Google uses to secure your information and safeguard your privacy. For more details, see Meet security and privacy and edu.google.com/privacy.
- Customer data—The Google Workspace for Education editions, which include Meet, do not use customer data for advertising. Google Cloud does not sell customer data to third parties. Meet does not have user attention-tracking features or software. In addition, Google does not store video, audio, or chat data unless a meeting participant initiates a recording during the Meet session.
- Transparency—Google is committed to transparency about our data collection policies and practices. The Google Workspace for Education privacy notice and agreement explain our contractual obligations to protect your data. We follow a rigid process for responding to government requests for customer data and we disclose information about the number and type of requests we receive from governments in the Google Transparency Report.
- Regular audits—We undergo regular rigorous security and privacy audits for our Cloud services, including Meet.
- Data retention—With Google Vault, admins can set retention policies for Meet recordings stored in Google Drive. This is useful to fulfill legal obligations.
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Smart features and personalization—You choose whether Google uses your data to make Google products better. Users can make different choices for their meetings. For more details, go to:
For more details, see Meet security and privacy.
Related topics
All data in Meet is encrypted in transit by default between the client and Google for video meetings on a web browser, on the Android and iOS apps, and in meeting rooms with Google Meet hardware.
Note: If you join a meeting by phone, audio is carried by the telephone network and might not be encrypted.
For more details, see Meet security and privacy.
- Required approval for external participants—Only the meeting creator can see and approve requests to join the video meeting from participants from outside of the school’s domain.
- Improved meeting moderation controls—Only meeting creators and calendar owners can mute or remove other participants. This ensures that instructors can't be removed or muted by student participants.
- Protection against reusing finished meetings—Meeting participants can’t rejoin nicknamed meetings once the final participant has left, unless they have meeting creation privileges to start a new meeting. This means if the instructor is the last person to leave a nicknamed meeting, students can’t join again until an instructor restarts the nicknamed meeting.
How this works
When a teacher starts a nicknamed meeting, it creates a 10-character meeting code and temporarily associates that code with the nickname. Users in the same domain can join using the nickname; users outside the domain can join if the teacher shares the temporary meeting code, found in the meeting’s URL.
After the last person has left the meeting, the temporary meeting code expires, as well as the association between the nickname and meeting code. If students haven’t been granted permission to create meetings, they cannot use the nickname or the meeting code. Teachers can re-use the nickname, which will create a new temporary meeting code, at which point students can use the nickname to rejoin.
Meet offers multiple precautions to keep your data private and secure. Learn more about security features for all Meet users.
Google Workspace for Education Plus editions gain these additional protections:
- Access logs—We log any Google admin access to Meet recordings stored in Drive, along with the reason why that access happened. You can review these logs with Access Transparency.
- Data regions—You can use Data Regions to store Meet recordings in Drive only in specific regions (i.e., US or Europe) (caveat - this doesn’t cover video transcodes, processing, indexing, etc.)
The Google Workspace for Education editions run on Google’s secure cloud-native infrastructure. It benefits from Google’s defense-in-depth approach, including purpose-built infrastructure; Google-controlled hardware stack; private and encrypted global network; layered data center security; internal privacy and security expertise; and robust security auditing/certification program.
Google’s network is engineered to accommodate peak demand and handle future growth. Our network is resilient and engineered to accommodate the increased activity we’ve seen on Meet. By leveraging Google’s global infrastructure, Meet can scale as quickly and efficiently as needed to satisfy demand.
Our Site Reliability Engineers are trained to find and address potential issues with Google Cloud Services like Meet before they arise and, in the event of a disruption, recover as quickly as possible. Google Cloud relies on massive amounts of compute and storage hardware to power services like Meet. Since much of that hardware is proprietary, we can forecast capacity forward many months to build ahead of demand.
Optimize security for your school
Admins
- Prepare your network—Learn how to provide high-quality video meetings.
- Set up student and teacher permissions—We recommend that only organizational units that contain faculty and staff have permission to start, record, or livestream meetings.
- Protect video meetings—When PSTN is enabled, anyone with the dial-in number and meeting PIN can join the call. To protect your meetings, disable telephony.
- Monitor meeting performance—To see per-meeting analytics, including participants, use the Meet Quality Tool.
Teachers
- Prevent students from reusing class meetings—To make sure students don’t rejoin a class meeting after it has ended, use nicknamed meetings instead of starting a meeting from a Google Calendar event. Even if you reuse the same nickname, participants will not be able to rejoin nicknamed meetings after the final participant has left and the 10-digit meeting code will no longer work.
To create a nicknamed meeting, use one of the following methods:
- Go to meet.google.com or the Meet mobile apps and enter a meeting nickname in the "Join or start a meeting” field.
- Use the Meet code automatically generated by Google Classroom
Important: Only Google Workspace users can create meetings with nicknames. Meeting codes expire instantly once all users leave the meeting.
