Technology Can school see google browsing history

[B7096]

I recently got an email account from my school with the schools domain in it. Not knowing i was signed in i looked up some things that could get me in a lot of trouble. I was just wondering can the head of my IT department see this or not. I already cleared it from my recent activity in the google settings.

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[KaapstadMK]

Okay, 2 questions:

1) Are you on the school's premises, using the school's wifi?
2) If you're afraid the content you were viewing would result in trouble professionally, should you be viewing it at all, whether in private or not?

And a bonus 3rd question for good measure:
If the content would result in professional issues, could it not also induce personal issues that would bleed into you ability to interact professionally?

(I'm open to PM if you'd rather not discuss it on a public forum)

 

[KaapstadMK]

Deleted

 

[berenstein]

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[Stroganoff]

I recently got an email account from my school with the schools domain in it. Not knowing i was signed in i looked up some things that could get me in a lot of trouble. I was just wondering can the head of my IT department see this or not. I already cleared it from my recent activity in the google settings.

I didn't know the answer to your question, so I looked it up. I haven't found anything definitive yet, but it looks like admins for Google Apps for Education and Google Apps for Work cannot see your Google search history simply by virtue of being an admin. They do have access to your e-mail account and Google Drive contents and any Google Apps you may use (Docs, Sheets, etc.). There are other indirect ways to snoop on you using techniques such as Deep Packet Inspection and HTTPS Man-in-the-Middle type things, but you'd have to be on the school's network (and especially on school-controlled devices) for these techniques to really be used.




Pro Tip: Try to stop using Google Search, full stop. I highly recommend DuckDuckGo ("The search engine that doesn't track you") for all your web searching needs. When the Snowden leaks first started coming out in summer 2013, I went through a re-awakening period on how I approach technology and privacy and security, and one of the first changes was to try to be owned less by Google. I've used DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for 3.5 years and highly recommend it without reservation! It was started by an MIT alumnus, and they really emphasize not tracking you and your searches, and the search engine gives great results too.

I love their "bang" system (a bang is shorthand for the exclamation mark, "!"). There's tons of bangs out there. So if I want to look up "turtles" on Wikipedia, I just type in !w turtles into my browser's URL or search bars, and it immediately passes that search through to Wikipedia. Or !yt whatever for YouTube. Or !a stuff for Amazon.

There's other privacy-centric search engines like StartPage (which uses Google for search results) and Ixquick, but I haven't used them that much.

 

[road2residency]

If you are on a school/institution/hospital network, IT has the ability to monitor ALL traffic coming through their network. The question is, does the IT department have the software in place to do that (if its a major school or hospital, they probably do) and is what you searched for bad enough for them to pay attention to you.

for future reference, if you are afraid of someone seeing what you are doing on the internet, don't do it from your laptop, don't do it on the school's network or don't do it at all.

You can also use a VPN

 

[Stroganoff]

Pssst. OP hasn't been seen from since his one post on this forum in April 2017. He's probably rotting away in Gitmo. Poor guy. He just did a 4 AM search "Will I bomb this exam?" and BAM! Feds swooped in.

 

[cableguy555]

I recently got an email account from my school with the schools domain in it. Not knowing i was signed in i looked up some things that could get me in a lot of trouble. I was just wondering can the head of my IT department see this or not. I already cleared it from my recent activity in the google settings.

You gotta be more specific. Schools don’t care if you watch porn (legal type of course). Unless you intentionally do something blatantly and indisputably illegal, they could care less. More importantly school administrators don’t have direct access to search history. It is the school’s internet service prodvider that has the access. Usually they’ll catch you for torrenting games or movies because they put a filter for websites such as piratebay and they’re trying to avoid getting sued. But usually such filters are set up with the schools ISP.

 

[MangoLabs]

Pssst. OP hasn't been seen from since his one post on this forum in April 2017. He's probably rotting away in Gitmo. Poor guy. He just did a 4 AM search "Will I bomb this exam?" and BAM! Feds swooped in.

 

[Stroganoff]

Yes, they can if they have any IT personnel. At present most school have them. Not that they after you but if you do anything dumb then they can go after you. Like you watched 18+ videos and forget to remove the cash, recent data's. IYou should use incognito more in those cases.

I'd be interested in reading where you got these answers. Please provide links to support your post.

At least in 2017 when I first posted in this thread, admins for Google Apps for Education and Google Apps for Work cannot specifically see Google search history simply by virtue of being an admin. In other words, there is no Google mechanism available to make Google searches visible to Google Apps admins.

The only thing I could speculate were non-Google methods: 1) either use a company or school asset with their own monitoring software installed (as opposed to using your own computer/phone/tablet); or 2) be on the company or school network (with especially a company asset with root certificate installed specifically for this purpose, or your own asset that's improperly configured) where a HTTPS Man-in-the-Middle attack takes place and your browser accepts the new root certificate for some reason.

Original post:

I didn't know the answer to your question, so I looked it up. I haven't found anything definitive yet, but it looks like admins for Google Apps for Education and Google Apps for Work cannot see your Google search history simply by virtue of being an admin. They do have access to your e-mail account and Google Drive contents and any Google Apps you may use (Docs, Sheets, etc.). There are other indirect ways to snoop on you using techniques such as Deep Packet Inspection and HTTPS Man-in-the-Middle type things, but you'd have to be on the school's network (and especially on school-controlled devices) for these techniques to really be used.

Edit: The fact that the thread OP only has 1 post is especially frustrating, since drive-bys waste everyone's time, and there's no follow-up or clarification to get more details from the OP.

 

[SterlingMaloryArcher]

I feel every college freshman veiws porn. When you are in a dorm and have to be on the schools wifi then that's really your only option. It didnt stop me and if they saw that I did that every night then oh well it's a little embarrassing but it is what it is.

If it was illegal then that's another story...