This article is for Education edition administrators. Other admins can go to Google Meet security & privacy for IT admins.
Keep your meetings safe with Google Meet. Meet takes advantage of Google's secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in protection, and global network to keep your meetings secure and private.
Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals and Google Workspace for Education Plus have extra features to keep school meetings secure and private. For example, teachers can prevent students from reusing class meetings.
If you already have the Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals or Google Workspace for Education Plus editions, you don’t have to set up new identities or deploy any additional resources to get started with Meet.
Google Meet security
All data in Meet is encrypted by default while moving between the client and Google. This is true for video meetings on a web browser, on the Android and iOS apps, and in meeting rooms using Google Meet hardware.
Note: If you join a meeting by phone, the telephone network carries the audio so it might not be encrypted.
For more details, go to Encryption.
- 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. For details, go to Add or remove people from a Google Meet meeting.
- 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. For details, go to Prevent students from reusing class meetings.
Meet offers multiple safeguards to keep your data private and secure. For details, go to Secure deployment, access & controls. Schools using Google Workspace for Education Plus also have these extra security features:
- Access logs—Google logs any Google admin access to Meet recordings stored in Drive, along with the reason for the access. 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). This is helpful for meeting legal obligations.
Important: Data regions don't apply to video transcodes, processing, indexing, etc.
Google’s network is engineered to accommodate peak demand and handle future growth. By leveraging Google’s global infrastructure, Meet can scale as quickly and efficiently as needed to satisfy demand.
The Google Workspace for Education editions run on Google’s secure, cloud-native infrastructure. These editions benefit from Google’s:
- Purpose-built infrastructure
- Hardware stack
- Private and encrypted global network
- Layered data center security
- Privacy and security expertise
- Security auditing and certification program
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.
- Customer data—Meet doesn't use your data for advertising or sell your data to third parties. Meet doesn't have user attention-tracking features or software. Google doesn't store video, audio, or chat data unless a meeting participant records the Meet session.
- Transparency—Google follows a rigid process for responding to government requests for customer data. We disclose information about the number and type of requests we receive from governments in the Google Transparency Report. For details, go to:
- Regular audits—To keep your data safe, Meet undergoes regular, rigorous security and privacy audits.
- Data retention—Use Google Vault to store Meet recordings in Google Drive. This is useful to fulfill legal obligations. For details, go to Retain Google Meet data with Vault.
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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 details, go to Manage Google Workspace smart features for your users.
For more details, go to Safer digital learning with Google for Education.
Improve school security
Follow the tips in this article to ensure high-quality video meetings without disruptions.
IT admins
- Prepare your network—Provide high-quality video meetings. For details, go to Prepare your network for Meet meetings & live streams.
- Manage permissions—Give organizational units that contain only faculty and staff permission to start, record, or livestream meetings. For details, go to Set up Meet (for education admins).
- Protect meetings—Protect your meetings by turning off telephony. When PSTN is turned on, anyone with the dial-in number and meeting PIN can join the call.
- Monitor performance—View meeting analytics with the Meet Quality Tool.
Teachers
Prevent students from reusing class meetings
Use nicknamed meetings instead of calendar events so that students can't rejoin after the class has ended. Meeting nicknames expire after all users leave the meeting.
Only Google Workspace users can create meetings with nicknames. To create a nicknamed meeting, use one of the following methods:
- Go to https://meet.google.com or the Meet mobile app and enter a meeting nickname in the "Join or start a meeting” field.
- Use the Meet code automatically generated by Google Classroom.
If a teacher reuses a nickname, students still can't rejoin the meeting after the final participant has left. The 10-digit meeting code also expires after everyone has left the meeting.
Important: Only Google Workspace users can create meetings with nicknames. Meeting codes expire instantly once all users leave the meeting.
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.
