Google Friend Connect Privacy Policy

Thanks for using Friend Connect! The Google Privacy Policy describes how we treat personal information when you use Google's products and services, including information provided when you use Friend Connect. In addition, the following describes our privacy practices that are specific to Friend Connect.

How does Friend Connect work?

It is up to individual websites to decide whether or not to offer Friend Connect. If they do, Friend Connect lets you use your Google Account or any service which supports OpenID (e.g., Yahoo, AOL Instant Messenger) to sign-in to and use social features on those websites ("Friend Connect sites"). We call these social features "gadgets", which are portions of a webpage that are developed and operated by someone other than the website you are visiting. The gadgets that appear on a website using Friend Connect are selected by the website owner, and may be developed by Google or other developers.

You can use Friend Connect to:

Invite friends from your current social networking sites to join Friend Connect sites, and become friends with other users on Friend Connect sites;
Publish your activity on a Friend Connect site back to your current social networking sites (if they support this functionality).

Because Friend Connect interacts with so many other services, up to five services may receive information about you when you use Friend Connect: 1) Google, 2) the Friend Connect site, 3) the developers of gadgets available on the site, 4) the social networking site(s) that you belong to already, and 5) if you use OpenID, your OpenID identity provider.

What information does Google receive when I use Friend Connect?

If you create or use an existing Google Account to use Friend Connect. Google asks for some personal information when you create a Google Account, including your email address and a password, which is used to protect your account from unauthorized access. If you use an OpenID account to use Friend Connect, Google will not receive the information you supplied your identity provider when you created your account. Your use of Friend Connect and your activity on Friend Connect sites will be stored in association with either your Google Account or your OpenID account.

Google receives the following information when you use Friend Connect:

Your Friend Connect activity on the site, including when you login and interact with the site's gadgets, which of your friends you have invited to join the site, which of your friends have accepted your invitations, and who your friends are on the Friend Connect site. This information is necessary to provide you with the service and to properly display any content only to those people you have chosen to share it with.
If you choose to invite friends from your current social networking sites, Google will request a list of your friends from that site to send the invitations. Depending on the site, Google may also receive limited information about those friends, such as nicknames and photos. Google will not retain this information for more than 24 hours.
For users who link in their Twitter account, Google also receives and stores your username and password; we will use this information only to provide you with the service, and will delete it if you choose to disconnect your Twitter account from your Friend Connect account.
If the site uses gadgets developed by Google the information collected by those gadgets will be governed by the Google Privacy Policy and this policy, unless otherwise noted in the gadget or before you first use the gadget.

For more details on how we use this information, see the "How Does Google Use My Information?" section below.

What information does the Friend Connect site receive?

The Friend Connect site will receive your Google Account or OpenID nickname and any content you choose to publish on the site, . The Friend Connect site will not receive information about who your friends are or who you invited. Please note that the Friend Connect site may collect information about you in parts of the website separate and apart from the Friend Connect service. You should review their privacy policy to learn about what information they collect and what privacy practices apply to that information.

What information does the gadget developer receive?

The Friend Connect site you visit chooses which gadgets are available on their site together with the Friend Connect service. These gadgets may collect information from you to provide you with their services. Before your information is shared with a gadget, you will be notified who the developer is, and will be given a choice as to whether you want to use that gadget. Gadgets developed by Google which comply with this Privacy Policy, however, may be enabled automatically.

The information received by gadget developers is subject to their privacy policies, and you should review those policies to learn more about their privacy practices.

What information does the social network site that I already belong to receive?

If you choose to use Friend Connect to invite friends from your existing social networks, those social networks will receive information about your use of Friend Connect and might also receive information about your activity on the Friend Connect site. While data collection practices will vary from site to site, some examples of data that a social networking site might receive include:

If you choose to invite friends from a social networking site, it will receive the fact that you are using Friend Connect to access and invite your friends.
Some social networking sites have features which allow you to send information about your activity on the Friend Connect site back to the social networking site (for example, to be published in your profile). If you choose to use these features, then your activity on the Friend Connect site may be shared with the social networking site.

The information received by your social networking sites is subject to their privacy policies, and you should review those policies to learn more about their privacy practices.

What information does your OpenID provider receive?

If you sign in to Friend Connect using an OpenID account, your OpenID identity provider will receive a limited amount of information about when you signed in to Friend Connect. Specifically, they will receive a request to validate your login credentials from Friend Connect each time you log in, but will not receive information about the sites you are joining or your activity on those sites.

How does Google use the information it receives?

In addition to the uses described in the Google Privacy Policy, the following describes practices specific to Friend Connect.

We use the information we collect to provide you with the Friend Connect service. For example, if you submit comments or make friends on a site, we store and display that information on the Friend Connect site.
In addition to the information displayed on the Friend Connect site, we also collect other information about your activity on the site, such as when you log into the site and how you interact with it. This information is stored in association with your Google Account and is retained for 13 weeks and then deleted. We use this information to maintain, protect and improve our services.

Your choices

You can terminate your Google Account at any time as described here, and all the Friend Connect information associated with your account will be deleted.
You can delete all the information about you on a Friend Connect site by clicking on the "Unjoin" link found in the Friend Connect settings page. You can also manage (or delete) your friends on that specific site. Anytime information is deleted from a Friend Connect site, it will be deleted from Google's servers within 14 days.
Please note that the Friend Connect site operator also has the ability to delete your account on the site, at his or her sole discretion, and can also delete individual comments. If the site operator deletes your account or your comments, that information will be deleted from the service.