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 an easy way for students 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 can be shared and viewed by your students is safe and trusted. 

You will need to modify certain settings in your G Suite admin console to manage such sharing via public Google Drive links. To do this: 

1. Log in to your G Suite admin console at admin.google.com
2. Navigate to Apps > G Suite and select the OU you want to implement restriction for. 
3. Now 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. Make sure that the checkbox for allowing users in your organization to receive files from users outside of your organization is unchecked. This will ensure that students are unable to access any external files that might contain potentially harmful content. 

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