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I am the tech lead on the Flywheel proxy. We do not use the data passing through the proxy for any purpose other than compression. This is covered by the Chrome privacy policy which you can read here:

https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/




I hope this is and remains to be the case, but it is not in your control. Decisions to include this information into personalization of search or access to law enforcement is not a technical decision and it is something that will be considered in the future after the feature has been broadly adopted. Similarly, any EULA or privacy terms are subject to change.

If you did not serve up this information to request even though you had access to it, your company WOULD be breaking the law - this has already been settled in court. It is my conclusion that, as law abiding citizens and company, you would serve such requests. I also tangentially believe that if you felt the information would be useful to create a better product (and/or make more money) you would do this, as you are also compelled by law to maximize profit for shareholders and are incentivized do so to by financial compensation. I see no reason why your company would break the law to restrict the scope of this feature.

Furthermore, I can not tell where it says on the privacy policy that you do not or will not use this information for personalization of search or in response to compulsion of law. I saw a mention in the privacy policy of the compression proxy, but nothing relevant to Google not using the information or being able to provide it to a third party upon compulsion. Could you point me to that?


This line: "You do not need to provide any personally identifying information in order to use Chrome" is intended to cover pretty much all of the cases you describe. I'm not going to speculate on legal issues.


I read that line a very different way and on its face it does mean something very different. The (very good) lawyers at Google may want to look at how this is phrased if it is intended to mean more than what it says plainly.

No need to speculate as appellate courts (and Google's own recent trials) have made the law quite clear.




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