"Technical information collected from the use of Google Fiber Internet for network management, security or maintenance may be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, but such information associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber will not be used by other Google properties without your consent. Other information from the use of Google Fiber Internet (such as URLs of websites visited or content of communications) will not be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, except with your consent or to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request."
All information we collect about the use of Google Fiber TV (including use of programs and applications available through Google Fiber TV) may be associated with the Google Account being used for Google Fiber TV.
... information from the use of Google Fiber Internet (such as URLs of websites visited or content of communications) will not be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, except with your consent or to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.
They don't really mention what information not associated to a Google account is mined except that it follows the company-wide privacy policy. So they probably mine it. It's probably comparable to Google DNS: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy
Request domain name, e.g. www.google.com
Request type, e.g. A (which stands for IPv4 record), AAAA (IPv6 record), NS, MX, TXT, etc.
Transport protocol on which the request arrived, i.e. TCP or UDP
Client's AS (autonomous system or ISP), e.g. AS15169
User's geolocation information: i.e. geocode, region ID, city ID, and metro code
Response code sent, e.g. SUCCESS, SERVFAIL, NXDOMAIN, etc.
Whether the request hit our frontend cache
Whether the request hit a cache elsewhere in the system (but not in the frontend)
Absolute arrival time in seconds
Total time taken to process the request end-to-end, in seconds
Name of the Google machine that processed this request, e.g. machine101
Google target IP to which this request was addressed, e.g. one of our anycast IP addresses (no relation to the user's IP)
will not be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber
This phrase has rather a lot of qualifications which make it trivially easy to circumvent. For example, Google might associate the data with a different account, an internal "ghost" account that you specifically don't use for Google Fiber (but which is identical to it in every way).
I for one would like to see ISPs make an effort to construct systems where even the owner of the ISP doesn't really store any information. For example, they may store differential information about traffic spikes, to help avert DOS attacks. But other than that, they only do what they get paid to do: shuttle bits back and forth across the last mile of internet.
Do you have evidence to present that Google Fiber is using the deep packet inspection referenced in the article? Because they make it clear that they don't here:
Oh, come on. Just connect your Google router to your Google fiber connection and connect to it with your smartphone or laptop running a Google operating system and Google browser. Visit your Google home page (using Google's DNS servers, of course) to read your Google Mail, or perhaps catch up on the news with Google News, or use Google+ to see what your friends are up to, or get a little work done on Google Docs. Should you do some Google searches and end up on some non-Google sites, don't worry - you're still safe under the watchful eye of Google AdSense and Google Analytics. What have you got to be so paranoid about?
For what it's worth, the whitepaper for their VPN makes some pretty strong claims to user privacy, with the VPN client being open source. Normally Google's privacy policies are fairly vague, but this seems to be very clear about the claims and what is/isn't logged. Maybe all the Cohort/Privacy Sandbox things makes IP somewhat irrelevant anyway, and they're just banking on folks who will continue to provide data through other Google services? I really can't speak for the true privacy implications of using the VPN, but I found this interesting.
There isn't any anonymity. Google "partners" with many ISPs (Comcast, for example), co-locates equipment, and they can link your current DHCP address to your customer name. It doesn't matter whether you even have an account with a Google service.
Before they had ISP account data, they knew the DHCP pool sizes and watched DNS lookups to identify users with a sufficient accuracy for most purposes. Most people visit a specific handful of sites, often at specific times or in a specific order.
For users coming in countries with better privacy laws, or through ISPs too small to be "partnered", Google buys tracking cookie information from various sources. There are hundreds (thousands?) of companies in that business. Cookie tracking isn't as good for finding your specific identity, but it's very specific about where you go and what you look at, which is primo information for marketing purposes.
"Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection"
> 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.
Alongside AS16591, Google Fiber may reannounce prefixes from the following on-net ASNs:
? AS19448
? AS-GOOGLE-IT
? AS6432
? AS19165
The AS-GOOGLE-FIBER aut-num object in RADb contains the most current list of ASNs.
"Technical information collected from the use of Google Fiber Internet for network management, security or maintenance may be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, but such information associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber will not be used by other Google properties without your consent. Other information from the use of Google Fiber Internet (such as URLs of websites visited or content of communications) will not be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, except with your consent or to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request."
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