Google Meet security & privacy for IT admins

This article is for administrators. If you're a user, go to the Meet help center. For details about security for Education editions, go to Meet security and privacy for education.

Protect your organization’s data and privacy with Google Meet's built-in features.

Protect privacy & data

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Privacy & compliance

To protect your privacy, Google gives you control over your info. Google also follows data protection laws and industry standards.

Control over your data—Meet has the same privacy and data protections as the rest of Google Cloud’s services.
- You own your data, not Google.
- Google does not use your data for advertising.
- Google does not sell your data to third parties.
- Your data is encrypted in transit.
- Your recordings stored in Google Drive are encrypted at rest.
- You control how long Google keeps your recordings.
- Meet does not have user attention-tracking features or software.
- You can set retention policies for Meet recordings with Google Vault to help fulfill legal obligations.
- Google does not store video, audio, or chat data unless someone in the meeting starts the recording.

For more details, go to the Privacy Resource Center.

Compliance—Experts outside of Google check Meet to make sure it is safe. They check security, privacy, and compliance. For more details, go to the Compliance resource center.
Transparency—Google provides customer data to governments who make proper requests. Google shares the number and types of requests it receives in the Google Transparency Report. For more details, go to:
- Google Transparency Report
- Creating trust through transparency
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:
- Smart features & controls in Google products
- Turn on or off Gmail, Chat, and Meet smart features and personalization (Region specific)

Encryption

Meet keeps your information safe by encrypting it. This means your data is scrambled so that only people with the right key can read it. Meet supports these encryption measures:

All data is encrypted while it travels over the internet.
- When you use your phone for audio in a meeting, your call might not be encrypted. This is because your audio goes over your phone company's network, and they might not encrypt it.
Meet recordings stored in Google Drive are encrypted.
Meet follows Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) security standards for Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) and Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP). Learn more about the DTLS extension to establish keys for SRTP.

Advanced encryption

Meet encrypts your data to keep it private. You can add an extra layer of encryption with Google Workspace client-side encryption (CSE).
CSE uses your organization's encryption keys. Meet video and audio is encrypted on the client’s browser before the data is sent to other meeting participants or to Google.
To use CSE, connect Google Workspace to an external encryption key service and identity provider (IdP). For more details, go to Use client-side encryption for users' data.

Anti-abuse measures

Keep your users safe in meetings with Meet. Here are some of the key anti-abuse measures we have in place:

Meeting codes—Meeting codes are long and hard to guess.
In-meeting features—Give your users more control in meetings by turning on host management. For details, go to Host Management.
Extra precautions for external participants—External participants can only join a meeting without asking to join if:
- They’re on the calendar invite before the meeting starts or they've been invited by someone in your organization who is already in the meeting.
- It's within 15 minutes of the scheduled start time for the meeting.
Dialing in by phone—Phone numbers and PINs are only valid during the scheduled meeting time. Phone participants can only join within 15 minutes of the scheduled meeting time.

Advanced anti-abuse measures

If the meeting has Google Workspace client-side encryption (CSE):

External participants must have an invitation to request to join the meeting.
Nobody can join using phones.

If the meeting doesn’t have CSE, any external participants can request to join the meeting. Only someone in your organization can accept the request.

Secure deployment, access & controls

Some ways Meet protects you:

Accessing Meet—Use Meet entirely in the browser for users on Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Edge browsers. For more details, go to Requirements for using Google Meet.
2-Step Verification—Make your account more secure. You can use a security key, a one-time password, or a text message. Learn how to Set up 2-Step Verification.
Advanced Protection Program—Join Google's Advanced Protection Program to help keep your account safe from phishing and hijacking. Learn more about Google's Advanced Protection Program.
Additional authentication methods—Use single sign-on (SSO) through SAML with all Google Workspace editions.
Logs—View audit logs for Meet in the Google Admin console. For more details, go to Meet log events.
Track access—Log every time an admin accesses Meet recordings and the reason for access. For more details, go to Access Transparency.
Recordings—Store Meet recordings in Drive only in specific regions (for example, the U.S. or Europe) using the data regions feature. For more details, go to Choose a geographic location for your data.

Incident management

Google has strict processes to keep you and your users safe. These processes help us prevent, find, and respond to security incidents. Managing incidents is a big part of how Google keeps things safe and private. Google also follows global privacy rules, like GDPR. For more details, check out the Data incident response process.

Incident prevention

Testing—Google looks for threats to keep you safe.
Code reviews—Google reviews code to look for problems.
Vulnerability reward program—Outside experts help Google find problems.

Incident detection

Network analysis—Google checks network traffic to find bad activity.
Product-specific tools and processes—Automated tools detect incidents in Google products.
Usage anomaly detection—Google uses machine learning to find unsafe activity.
Data center security alerts—We check data centers for incidents that might affect your org.

Incident response

Expert response—Experts respond to all types of data incidents.
Notifications—A process for quickly notifying affected orgs. It's in line with Google’s commitments in our Terms of Service and agreements.

Safety best practices

Use these tips to help you create a meeting space your users can trust.

Before a meeting

Share meeting links carefully, especially in public.
Be mindful when inviting external attendees.
Be cautious when anonymous users request to join a meeting.
Use Google Calendar to send Meet invites. For details, go to Start or schedule a Google Meet meeting.
Turn on 2-step verification. This helps prevent account takeovers, even if someone has your password. For more details, go to Make your account more secure.
Take Google’s Security Checkup. It's a tool that gives you personalized recommendations to strengthen the security of your organization’s Google Account. Start your Security Checkup

During a meeting

Make sure the names and faces on each tile match. Anonymous users get to choose what name they'll use for a meeting.
If you see bad behavior during a meeting or a user you don't recognize, you can remove them from the meeting. Use Host Management or moderator security controls to do this. For details, go to Add or remove people from a Google Meet meeting.

After a meeting

If you need to share a meeting screenshot publicly, make sure the URL isn't visible.

Meeting ID best practices

Use long IDs

Long IDs are more secure than short meeting IDs and harder to guess. Long IDs are automatically added to calendar events and meeting invites when you create them, and they don't expire.

Use both ID types if you're in transition

Long IDs support calendar integrations and short IDs are helpful if your system is hard to enter long codes into.
To join a meeting with a short ID, users have to enter the ID manually. Calendar events and invites include a link where users can get the short ID. Short IDs expire a few weeks after they're last used.

Report abuse

If you believe that someone is violating the Google Meet acceptable use policies, you can report that abuse.

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