Bypass Screen Saver with YouTube

[snoble]

Long-time lurker, first time poster, so please forgive me if this is a mislabeled or confusing post! First things first, this community is incredible. You all are such an incredible wealth of knowledge and have helped save my bacon many times.

I'm having an issue with users bypassing the screenlock/screensaver timeout by playing a YouTube video, which is obviously against our policy. Any ideas on how to prevent them from doing this (besides blocking YouTube)?

[crbeck]

I assume by putting the video in full screen?

I don't think there is any method to prevent that sort of bypass. Even if you block YouTube, I would imagine any site with a media player that can be made full screen (like news sites) would do the same thing. Same thing with PowerPoint or Google Sheets in presentation mode.

Honestly, it's an HR/management problem. If you have a documented policy in place, and users are knowingly/purposefully bypassing that policy, then the user's manager needs to enforce the policy. Otherwise there's no point to having policies. Playing whack-a-mole with blocking sites isn't even a slap on the wrist.

[snoble]

Totally agree. They’re not even putting it in full screen they’re just running the video in the background. Interesting it seems like if you do it without minimizing window it doesn’t need to be in the foreground for it to have that affect.