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You may need to elaborate a bit more on what your are trying to achieve; it looks like your post is missing a bit of backstory. It sounds like your concern is keeping your personal business and school activities separate, though.
- Switching away from Google is overall a good thing for privacy, but if your goal is privacy from your school, not from Google itself, it makes no difference who you want to use for email.
- Creating an additional account on your PC is not detrimental to privacy; in fact, some might argue that having a separate account for separate tasks is actually a good thing. I have multiple accounts on my servers, depending on what/who needs to log in. It doesn’t hurt to do the same on a desktop PC or laptop.
- Simply accessing school resources on your PC isn’t going to send the school your personal information, browser history, pirated movies, whatever. Clear your browser cookies between sessions if you’re concerned. Better yet, just set your browser to automatically clear cookies when you close the window, and make sure you exit the browser when you’re done with school work.
- Do you really need to use your school e-mail for anything other than school? I have a work email, but I only use it for things that are directly related to my job.
What you’re saying doesn’t really make a lot of sense. A lot of people here are probably happy to help you out, but you’ll need to be a bit more clear on what your goal is. I get the impression that you’re concerned about your school having some kind of privileged access to your computer because you check your school email and work on school assignments using personal computing resources. That’s not something you need to worry about; it’s really not how technology works. Logging into your school’s online portal doesn’t give them access to your files any more than buying something on Amazon.com lets Jeff Bezos browse your system.
If you’re really, REALLY concerned about privacy, just set up a VM using VirtualBox (it’s free and easy) for school stuff and continue to use your computer as you would normally. If you’re already comfortable re-installing Windows, then you absolutely will be able to set up a simple Windows VM. To be clear, I wouldn’t consider this necessary, but if you want to do it for peace of mind, then you have nothing to lose.
This situation becomes vastly different if you have a company or school-issued computer. In that case, then I wouldn’t use it for anything other than strictly business (or school)-related activities. Given the fact that you’re able to reformat and add/remove accounts, though, it doesn’t sound like you’re using a computer managed by an IT department.
On a side note, if your school did some how manage to gain access to your personal computer without your permission, find information that was detrimental to you, and somehow use it against you, I would ask you two things:
- What the hell kind of school are you going to?
- Do you like money? Because you and your lawyer are going to get a lot of it.
Hahah thank you for answering! You’re right I was trying to be brief and forgot to better explain this part: I use the university email to sign for Microsoft office, they gave us free access during covid. I read a lot of stuff about people mistakingly enrolling in their school’s environments (if I got it right, I might mistake terms) and I decided to do this. I had added a school account on my device, and even if I think it wasn’t the main one, I still didn’t really understand when it was activated and when not. Also I didn’t like the cloud file that would always appear in my documents…
Now I will obviously need to access those apps again, Outlook for sure and Teams for some lessons recordings… How does that work? Am I safe when using them for example on chrome, and not creating a school account? Maybe it’s a silly question but I just wanted to make sure, or at least someone might just go “hey wait this happened to me so pay attention to this and that”… hope this clarifies it a bit 😅
I understand what you’re saying. As far as using your school account to sign in to Microsoft Office, the fact that you use a school account should not make a difference in terms of privacy. If you’re using Outlook and Teams for school, just don’t use them for personal things, and you should be fine. If you’re using the web versions through a web browser, then you have nothing at all to worry about. If you actually install the apps, you still likely have nothing to worry about, although I would make sure they’re at least signed out and closed when you’re not using them. You don’t want to accidentally send a message to your school’s Teams group when you’re drunk and watching YouTube videos at 3am.
As far as “enrolling in your school’s environment,” I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean by that. I know that some companies will install corporate nanny-ware on systems that they issue out to their employees (you’ve probably heard about CrowdStrike), but if you’re using a personal laptop for school, that’s not going to happen unless you hand it over to the school’s IT department and say “please fuck up my computer.”
Most likely the “cloud” file you see in your documents is a Microsoft OneDrive account that comes included with your school’s Office subscription. You can use it as a backup for schoolwork, ignore it completely, or just uninstall OneDrive. I like keeping my important stuff on local storage, but if you want a place to back up a project, go ahead and use it. Maybe don’t copy your porn stash over to your OneDrive account.
I am a strong advocate for keeping things separate on your computer. Not necessarily from a privacy standpoint, but more so just to keep everything tidy and easy to manage. If I was just using Teams and Outlook, maybe logging into an online portal, I’d probably just do exactly that without a second thought. If you find that you’re installing a lot of different applications for your studies, like I mentioned before, you might consider setting up a VM. A VM (Virtual Machine) essentially acts as a second computer within your own. You would install a hypervisor (I’d recommend VirtualBox for you), and inside the hypervisor, you can create separate “virtual” computers. You install your operating system, boot up the virtual machine, and use it just like you would a whole separate PC. When you’re done, you shut it down, and when you no longer need it, just delete the VM, and your PC isn’t cluttered with a bunch of stuff you don’t need. The “hard drive” for your VM lives in a single file, and once that file is deleted, it’s as if your virtual machine never existed. One way to think of it is like building a house inside a room in your own house. You still have a bedroom, a kitchen, bathrooms, and a living room. Only in this “virtual” house, you can paint the walls, throw parties, trash the carpet, invite hobos to live on your couch, whatever you want. When the house gets too trashed to live in any more, you just hit “delete” and it disappears; the actual house you live in is still in pristine condition.
So just as a summary, my opinion is just use your computer normally. Log into whatever school resources you need and don’t worry. If you need to install a whole bunch of school-related stuff that you don’t want cluttering up your PC, set up a VM.
It’s probably also worth noting that your school almost certainly isn’t trying to damage your computer or catch you doing something you want to keep private. They’re providing resources (a free Office subscription, for example) that they think might help facilitate your studies. You can use those resources, or not, but your computer is still your personal property, and your school isn’t trying to infringe on that.
Thank you a lot! This was really helpful ❤️ I think I’ll stick to using the web versions and I’ll also consider a VM in the future, it’s very interesting! Thank you again, for taking the time to help and being crystal clear too!
Sounds like a solid plan. I’m glad I could help.
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I wouldn’t be using Gmail at all, I was thinking about creating a google account using my proton mail
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I really like Firefox Relay. I think they have a paid version, but the free version allows 5 different emails masks, and you can set masks to either forward emails, or to just block them. I find this latter function useful for things that make you put in your email address to get past a wall (which doesn’t necessarily involve signing up).
This is hardly related to anything at all, but be careful about using your university email as a login for too many things. At least at my university, we only have access to the email for the duration we were in school (and a bit of a grace period afterwards). So afterwards it can be a real pain to switch over a bunch of accounts. And if you forget to switch them over in time you can lose access to them.
No that’s not my case, I only talked about the university mail to say that I’m gonna use them for the university apps (of course). I’m asking something else
What are you worried about?
Create a VM on your machine and use it for things you don’t trust, such as a windows work/school account.
Didn’t know about that! I will look it up cause I’m curious, if you’d like to tell me more I’d love it (like is it just for security or in what other ways can it be used?)
