A follow up on Google Policies
Last year, I started to analyze Google Search and Google Suggest logs retention policies for the NYU Privacy Research Group meetings. To complete this analysis, I’m trying to review policies of other Google services.
‘Personal Information’ vs ‘Information we collect’
While I just started this review, I noticed that Google seems to change the name of the section describing the recorded information. This section is either called:
- “Personal Information” for +1, Blogger, Buzz, Notebook, Groups, Knol, Moderator, Music, Orkut, Picasa, Power Meter, SafeBrowsing , Sites, Voice, Web History and YouTube
- “Information we collect” for Advisor, Checkout, Desktop, Gears, TV, Location, Mobile, Toolbar, Trader, Web Accelerator.
My first understanding was that for services that require a Google Account to be used, Google uses the terms “Personal information” otherwise it uses “Information we collect”. But there are several exceptions. For instance, SafeBrowsing does not require an account to be used but Google TV does.
In addition, explicit references to server logs are made in these Personal Information sections while Google does not consider server logs as Personal Information (see their FAQ).
The Knol bridge
A loophole in Knol Privacy Policy allows Google to link your IP address and cookies to your user account. Knol (for Knowledge) is Google’s alternative to wikipedia. You need to have a Google account to contribute to Knol and — like most for Privacy Policy of Google services — Google mentions that it :
‘records information [your] account activity (e.g., storage usage, number of log-ins, actions taken), data displayed or clicked in the Knol interface […] and other log information (e.g., browser type, IP address, date and time of access, cookie ID, referrer URL). If you are logged in we may associate that information with your account.‘ [emphasis is mine]
This last sentence is unusual and suggest that if you ever logged in and visited Knol, Google can associate your IP address and Cookie IDs to your Goolge Account — and all the personal information attached to it. From that, Google can directly de-anonymized the searches you did when you were not logged in.
A policy template
This loophole is certainly not intentional; this exact sentence appears in many privacy policies . As a matter of fact, this sentence also appears in YouTube and Blogger policies. Therefore we can assume that a same template has been used for services hosting user generated content.
However there are two big differences between Knol and Youtube or Blogger:
- There is no explicit mention of the server logs in these policies. For these services, Google only mention that their ‘servers automatically record information about your use of the service’.
- Both Blogger and YouTube have their own domain names, meaning that cookies you send to YoutTube are different from the cookies you send when you’re visiting a Google website. Unlike these services, Knol uses Google domain name. Therefore, you send to Knol cookies that you also send to Google when you are doing a search.
While not dramatic considering Knol relative lack of success, this mistake could have been more critical in the privacy policy of a more popular service.