How to Block Students from Accessing Public Google Drive Links

While file sharing via Google Drive is easy and commonly used by students, it can also be a way for them to share inappropriate or illegally obtained copyrighted material. To best protect your students, we recommend the following best practices for restricting their access to publicly available Google Drive links outside of your domain. This will ensure that only content that your students can share and view is safe and trusted.

To manage sharing via public Google Drive links, you must change some settings in the Google Admin Console.

1. Log in to your Google Admin Console at admin.google.com
2. Navigate to Apps > Google Workspace and select the Organizational Unit (OU) you want to implement restrictions for.
   
   

3. Go to Drive and Docs > Sharing settings

   

4. Under the Sharing options field, select the option to turn off the sharing of files outside of your organization. This will block users from sharing Google Drive files with users outside of your organization.

   

5. Ensure that the checkbox for allowing users in your organization to receive files from users outside your organization is unchecked. This will ensure that students cannot access external files containing potentially harmful content.

If you want to implement even more stringent rules for public sharing via Google Drive, please refer to this support article from Google.