How to make Chromecast Private – Methods to Secure Chromecast

It can get very annoying when friends, roommates, or neighbors start hogging your Chromecast. It is easy for them to do this because they are on the same network, and there are no restrictions in this case.

If telling them nicely is not working for you, you must take a few steps to ensure that your Chromecast is private.

Thankfully, the neat little device from Google has this capability, and you only need to make a few changes in the Settings to achieve it. In this article, we will help you with the same through various steps. so that no one ever interrupts your Chromecast streaming time.

How to make Chromecast Private?

There are actually a few ways to do this.

• Switch the notifications off: This is the simplest method, and it will help you the most if your friends like goofing off while you are streaming something. Just go to Cast Media Settings using
  your Android and disable the notifications. The only thing to note here is that this is available only for Android. iOS users do not have this feature.
• Switch the Guest Mode off: This is, of course, more reliable. If the Guest Mode is off, your friends or guests cannot use the Chromecast. This is what you must do to switch it off:
  a. Open Google Home on your mobile device.
  b. Go to Account (you will see the icon on the top right corner) and then tap Devices.
  c. Find the device(s) that is/are bothering you and tap.
  d. Here, you can switch the Guest Mode off.
• Get a VLAN: With a VLAN, you will have an isolated network all to yourself. All your roommates will be on another VLAN, and you can also ensure that they don’t communicate with yours. The awesome part about this is that they won’t have any hindrance using the Internet. So they don’t need to know what you did! You can rejoice that they will never be able to meddle with your Chromecast again!
• Get a travel router: Keep in mind that this is not a Wi-Fi extender. A travel router will help you create your own private network that none of your friends can access. Once you set it up, you just have to shift your Chromecast to this network. The icing on the cake is that travel routers are incredibly cheap.

Even though it feels like Google made a privacy error by not creating a better model to secure the network, we are happy that there are ways around it. If you have any alternative methods, we would love to add them to our list. Do let us know through comments.