Wow, didn't know it was this bad. Though it makes sense that Google, Cloudflare, and co would grab every DNS query they can get get, as additional sensor data for tracking. As if this wasn't crystal clear already from the push towards DNS-over-HTTP.
We do not correlate or associate personal information in Google Public DNS logs with your information from use of any other Google service except for addressing security and abuse." https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy
Do you have proof that the opposite is true?
Why would this be necessary with the big gaping hole in the assertion?
> except for addressing security and abuse.
I expect Google and I have very different conceptions of what qualifies as "abuse" and how to "address" it.
Seems like _not_ giving away data is the only way to be sure if that. Everything else is subject to change.
The "Google does not use any personal information collected through the Public DNS service to target ads" sentence is oddly specific as well. Why is it only mentioning "targeted ads" and not "for any sort of purposed"? Why is it collected if you're not using it? What does "abuse" really mean in this context, and what does "addressing" it entail? Only the big guys at Google knows.
Finally, the holy privacy policy of Google can change at any time. "We change this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent." it says, which makes sense if you're a Google user. What about me, who don't have a Google account? How do I, tell this public DNS service that I don't agree to the new privacy policy? Right, I can't, you assume I'm fine with it.
I think we're long past the point of having to prove that various tech companies don't care about people's privacy. The burden of proof that you're actively taking steps to preserve it is on you, as you've already burned all the goodwill you had from the internet crowd.
"We take your privacy, very seriously"
Why are they collecting personal information in the first place, for a public DNS service that is supposedly built for "faster and safer DNS infrastructure"? Collecting no personal data would certainly be the fastest and safest for me as a user.
There is a huge distinction to be made in collecting vs. storing. The 8888 privacy policy also calls out that some personal information is stored, for how long, and for what purpose. But most people who claim that they're not collecting personal information are just not being accurate in their privacy statements.
Disclaimer: googler, opinion is my own and not my employer's.
What the hell are you talking about?! Of course you can, why wouldn't you be able to? You think the internet and the web started out with having everyone automatically collecting everyones personal information?
> Disclaimer: googler
Aha, yeaaaah, now it makes sense that you don't think it's possible to do anything else but to collect personal data. While the opinion is your own, it's pretty obvious what its been influenced by.
"You cannot run any internet service without collecting personal information" is not true, you can absolutely run services on the internet that collects and/or stores 0 personal data. That they don't know how to, is besides the point, but that doesn't make it impossible, it just means they don't know how to.
Now you can probably keep this for typical security purposes for a week or so, and even aggregated page hits, without permission so you're not entirely wrong
Running netflow probably counts as collecting PII, but the main idea is
1) Why are you collecting it. Clearly storing connection details in a firewall is acceptable.
2) Why are you keeping it. Storing IP logs for security purposes is fine for example.
3) How are you keeping it secure and ensuring you only keep it for the shortest amount of time you need.
Yeah, and the defaults for mongodb is to let anyone edit the database, at least it used to be so. Doesn't mean you should run it like that.
You can, as soon as you receive a request, hash the IP address and store the hash instead of storing the cleartext IP. If there is no way of reversing the hash (which there shouldn't, wouldn't be much of a hash then), you're not storing any IP anymore, and it's not personal data.
Strikes me as very weird someone who supposed to be high-level developer or employee at one of the biggest companies in the world don't know how not build applications that stores personal information. But since that company is Google, it hardly surprises anyone.
There's nothing wrong with storing individual IPs temporarily for security and functionality purposes, but you're still collecting them - if nothing else they'll show up in your netflow sessions and your netstat output
I didn't know! Here is my IP as a sha256, please reverse it and show me you actually know what you're talking about: 20adfe5288d85b6279dc65eff126828c0b20b896cb853caef9de0d6251e46169
This quote is from 2012: "I do 622 million SHA-256's per sec on a Radeon HD5830."
You might have salted it or encoded in a 'clever' way like hex or words or whatever, but as you know the method you can do it.
What prevents you, in future when policy changes, to start using such data?
Even in cases where using the data would directly violate a contract, bankruptcy courts / acquisition agreements routinely sell the data off as an “asset” and nullify any restrictions from existing agreements.
A change in the law that kept the copyright of personal data with the individual the data was about would improve the situation somewhat, but it’s probably safer to just ban the collection of this sort of data set (unless there’s explicit opt-in, and people derive no benefit from opting in).
Google has simply shut down too many information channels (MMS, RSS, Usenet, forcing https, to name a few) in the name of "security", when they are the ones to gain from this deprivation and monopolization into the "open web".
Nobody can convince me Google has oppressed political minorities in mind with DNS-over-HTTP.
All those products that got killed mostly started that way, employee's wanted them and google had the money to make them happen. Eventually though if they're not growing, then who in google wants to work on them?
Did google also see it as a strategic way to make sure dns providers couldn't force search results elsewhere? Probably, but then as users WE certainly don't want dns providers fucking with dns in that manner either.
Google wins when the Internet is fast. Google's goals here are that you can use Websearch quickly and without hotspots etc meddling with traffic. The story is simple: If companies meddle with DNS results, or provide poor performance, then users don't use the Internet as much, and Google doesn't get to sell ads. Google wants you to have the fastest, most reliable Internet it can, because that means you don't get frustrated and go do something else. Google doesn't need to scrape the logs for whatever people think google might be scraping the logs for.
Google _does_ log some data for dealing with abuse (as you can probably imagine 8.8.8.8 gets a _lot_ of intentional and unintentional abuse), but tries to be as clear as it can be about what gets logged, what it's used for, and how long it's kept. Google treats these logs very very carefully, carefully limiting who has access, and when you need to use the logs to debug something, it's very carefully audited.
Disclaimer: I used to be one of the SREs oncall for Google Public DNS (but not any more – I now work for a different SRE team at Google).
IMO, it is reasonable to assume that an advertising company would use data (that consumers give them) to further enhance and target ads to those consumers.
yet.
And Goolge is way past where I assume they have good intentions. Do you have any proof Google isn't doing something creepy with that data it collects from DNS logs ?
For each 12 TB they purchase for logging DNS queries per day, they could store a bit over 2KB per user. Assuming reasonable compression, they shouldn’t be spending more than 2-4B to log each request, so they can store 500-1000 queries per user.
My guess is they could store everything, but choose to apply some aggregation.
“We collect personal information through the public DNS service, but do not use it to target ads.”
Sentence 2: We log dns queries and correlate and associate personal information in these logs with other google and third party (and presumably Alphabet, YouTube, etc) services.
Datasets that were correlated from Google services is only used to address security and abuse.
No, you changed the meaning when editing. The original sentence does not confirm the personal data is collected, but if it is it's not used to target ads. This is pedantic, but if you're trying to explain someone's written policy it's important not to put words in their mouth.
Would you sign a lease that said the landlord wouldn’t use any video surveillance from hidden cameras inside the home to bring legal charges against the tenants?
You can be sure every word of this part of the privacy policy was crafted to sound as reasonable as possible without limiting any of their existing behavior.