More than 30 million students, teachers and administrators rely on Google Apps for Education every day to communicate and collaborate more efficiently. We are committed to protecting the privacy and security of all of our users, including students, to make sure their information is safe, private and always available to them.

Ads-free

No ads in Google Apps for Education services. Period.

There are no ads in Google Apps for Education services and we have no plans to change this in the future. Additionally, K-12 Google Apps for Education users do not see ads when they use Google Search and are signed in to their Apps for Education accounts.

No advertising-related scanning or profiles

Google Apps for Education services do not collect or use student data for advertising purposes or create advertising profiles.
Gmail for consumers and Google Apps for Education users runs on the same infrastructure, which helps us deliver high performance, reliability and security to all of our users. However, Google Apps is a separate offering that provides additional security, administrative and archiving controls for education, business and government customers.
Like many email providers, we do scanning in Gmail to keep our customers secure and to improve their product experience. In Gmail for Google Apps for Education, this includes virus and spam protection, spell check, relevant search results and features like Priority Inbox and auto-detection of calendar events.  Scanning to provide product features is done on all incoming emails and is 100% automated. We do NOT scan Google Apps for Education emails for advertising purposes.
Additionally, we do not collect or use any information stored in Apps for Education users’ Google Drive or Docs (or Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms) for any advertising purposes.
Users who have chosen to show Adsense ads on their Google Sites will still have the ability to display those existing ads on their websites. However, it willno longer be possible to edit or add new AdSense ads to existing sites or to new pages.

Your data is yours

Data ownership and management

Google Apps for Education users own their data, not Google. The data schools and students put into our systems is theirs, and we believe it should stay that way — it even says so in our contracts.
  • We provide powerful, easy-to-use management tools, and dashboards help administrators keep track of their organization's services, usage and data.
  • We only keep your data as long as you require us to keep it.
  • If an education department, school or university decides to no longer use Google we make it easy for them to take their data with them.

We protect your data

We don’t sell your Google Apps for Education data to third parties and we do not share personal information placed in our systems with third parties, except in the few exceptional circumstances described in your Google Apps agreement and our Privacy Policy, such as when you ask us to share it or when we are required to do so by law. However we do not provide governments with access to our systems and we review all requests to make sure they meet both the letter and spirit of the law before complying. When possible and legal to do so, we notify affected users about requests for user data that may affect them. And if we believe a request is overly broad, we will seek to narrow it. For full details, please refer to your Google Apps agreement and the "Information Sharing" section of our Privacy Policy.

Our services are compliant

We comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the US-EU Safe Harbor agreement

Google Apps for Education complies with FERPA and our commitment to do so is included in our agreements. Google is registered with the US-EU Safe Harbor agreement, which helps ensure that our data protection compliance meets European Union standards for educational institutions.

Our services can be used in compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA)

Ensuring the safety of student data is important to us. We contractually require Google Apps for Education schools to get the parental consents that COPPA calls for to use our services, and our services can be used in compliance with COPPA.

Additional security features

Google Apps for Education offers schools a number of additional controls and security features.

Of course, good privacy requires strong security. We have more than 400 full-time engineers — the world’s foremost experts in security — working to protect your information. We always use an encrypted HTTPS connection when you check or send email in Gmail, which means no one can listen in on your messages as they go back and forth between your laptop, phone or tablet and Gmail’s servers — even if you’re using public WiFi.
We were also the first to offer important security tools, like free two-step verification, encrypted connections between your browser and our servers as well as between our own servers, in addition to many other security innovations. Google Apps and our data centers are also SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 Type II SOC 2-audited(1) and have achieved ISO 27001 certification.(2)
Google Apps customers also have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, 24/7 customer phone support, greater storage capacity and the ability for school administrators to turn certain features or services on or off.
1. SSAE 16 / ISAE 3402 is an auditing standard by which a third-party auditor evaluates the controls in place for physical and logical security, privacy, incident response, and more.
2. ISO 27001 is an industry standard security evaluation certified by Ernst & Young CertifyPoint.