Privacy Inquiry

  • Resolved uvicuser

    (@uvicuser)


    8 years, 7 months ago

    Hello,

    I work for a public education institution in British Columbia Canada – The University of British Columbia. I have a client who is interested in this plugin for our campus-wide instance of WP. As we have some very strict privacy restrictions in this Province, I am required to ask the following:

    Does the Google Document Embedder Plugin collect, maintain or share any personally identifiable or sensitive information?

    Thanks in advance for your response.

    James

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/google-document-embedder/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Contributor danlester

    (@danlester)

    The plugin uses a third party viewer – namely Google Document Viewer.

    The closest terms of service are probably these for Google Drive: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2450387?hl=en&rd=1

    The plugin itself doesn’t collect, maintain or share any personally identifiable or sensitive information.

    I hope this helps!

    Thanks,

    Dan

    Thread Starter uvicuser

    (@uvicuser)

    Hi Dan,

    Thanks for your reply! I do have some follow-up questions when you have a chance.

    1. Perhaps I am being overly sensitive but your indication to check the Google Drive TOS makes it seem like there is still a real-time connection with Google somewhere in this plugin? Does the plugin simply use Google’s code to render the viewer? Are you aware if any information is transmitted externally (eg. to Google) by the Google Document Viewer itself?

    2. Does the Google Document Viewer within the plugin ever ask users to log-in to their Google accounts? Are users ever encouraged to log-into or sign up for Google accounts within this plugin?

    Thanks in advance for any clarification you can provide.

    James

    Plugin Contributor danlester

    (@danlester)

    James,

    Yes, the entire ‘viewing experience’ is exclusively rendered by Google. This plugin is really just a way to make it easy to embed documents using Google’s Document Viewer, but you could even do that without the plugin anyway.

    I don’t think the viewer ever asks you to create or login to a Google account, but again the entire experience is delivered by Google, so I can’t guarantee that!

    Sorry if it wasn’t clear on the plugin’s main page, but Google’s support for their viewer seems to be diminishing, so that fact combined with your concerns over privacy would lead me to strongly suggest just avoiding this plugin really!

    Thanks,

    Dan

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Privacy Inquiry’ is closed to new replies.