Although it's tempting to use your work Google account for everything, here are 5 good reasons to keep your personal and professional digital life separate.
- Keeping your personal and profession digital life separate gives you more control over the boundaries between work and home. If being online is part of your relaxation activity, you don’t want to expose yourself to work emails in your downtime. Keeping your accounts separate lets you consciously choose whether or not you want to see work emails without preventing you from using email to catch up with friends, handle household bills, or exchange photos with faraway family members.
- The School District has access to all your work account emails, documents, photos, etc. and, with cause, can view them. When you work for a school, there is no expectation of privacy when it comes to your work Google account. If the District has a reason to look through your work account, they can, and you might not even know about it.
- Since you work for a school, your emails are subject to Freedom of Information Act Requests and your email could become part of a lawsuit. If the school gets sued, your email could become part of the discovery process in a lawsuit. That means that any private emails on your school account could be turned over to attorneys and become part of a public record. That could be pretty embarrassing if you are using your work email for personal correspondence.
- However unlikely, you may eventually decide to leave your current position and when that happens, you will lose access to your work Google account. If you used your work email to sign up for a site like Amazon or Netflix, you may find it difficult to recover a forgotten password since many password reset requests go to a registered email account and you will no longer have access to that account.
- Data and files cannot be moved directly from one online account to another online account. That includes email, documents, photos, etc. If you conduct personal business on your work email account and/or store personal documents, photos, videos, etc. on your work Google account, you will find it very difficult to move those items into your personal Google account. Since the District has the responsibility to protect student data, it does not allow staff to transfer files in bulk from their work account to a personal account or onto a device.
Switching Between Accounts - the best way.
It is easy to manage 2 Google accounts on your school laptop.
- Open your Chrome Browser
- On a Macbook, you can either click on "People" in the menu bar at the top of the window or click on your name (not photo) in the upper right. Choose "Add Person" or "Manage People" and sign in with your personal Gmail account.
- To help keep track of your accounts, choose different icons and names for your personal and work accounts.
- To switch between accounts, click on "People" in the menu bar at the top of the window, or click on your name (not photo) in the upper right and choose the other account in the drop down menu.
Important! It is much easier and less confusing to add a second account using the instructions above than by clicking on your photo in the upper right and choosing "Add Account". The problem with switching between accounts by choosing "Add Account" instead of "Add Person" is that data and settings in your personal and work accounts can get confused. From Google Help: "Sometimes settings might carry over. If you're signed in to multiple accounts at the same time, sometimes we can't tell which account you're using. For example, if you're signed in to two accounts and you open a new browser window, we aren't sure which account you want to use."
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