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Comment by sellandb | Hacker News Reader

I would be interested if statistical data gleaned from DNS makes it's way into any other service areas. DNS would seem like a useful way to rank the popularity of web sites, I am sure there are some interesting enhancements that could be made using that data.

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I think their privacy policy disallows it: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html

> We don't correlate or combine your information from the temporary or permanent logs with any other data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network.

And they say that the logs are only used for debugging, DoS protection and abuse.

The quote from the policy says nothing about using or not using the information about what DNS queries are made for data mining or ranking.

Data mining and ranking is neither debugging, nor DoS protection or abuse protection, so I don't see how it could be allowed.

The FAQ makes it even more clear:

> Is information about my queries to Google Public DNS shared with other Google properties, such as Search, Gmail, ads networks, etc.?

> No.

I did not mean "my queries" being "shared" but the query collection/archive as a whole. It would be another source to know what domains the people visit.

> And they say that the logs are only used for debugging, DoS protection and abuse.

Source?

Rereading it, I see it's less clear how it applies to aggregated data.

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