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by nodata 5217 days ago
Privacy implications?
2 comments

The privacy risk for GSB in general is that you are sharing URLs with a (trusted) third party. That's most acute with the REST API, but most implementations (including gsb4ugc) cache a local copy of the lookup tables and so don't actually send URLs to Google. There is still a very occasional need to send a link to Google for validation, but in the server-side case the only context Google has for the request is the IP address of the server, which minimizes privacy risks as much as possible.
With GSBv2, no URL is sent to Google. They recently introduced the Lookup API where users need to send the URL, but this is not what Etsy is using.