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I have a document in my Google drive, which I want somebody else to download from a Google Sites website I have created. But I don't want the person viewing the document to know my identity, and I don't want to be able to know the identity of anybody viewing the document. This is because the document is part of a paper submission to an academic conference, where the reviewers will be downloading and viewing this document, and the conference requires strict anonymity between the authors and the reviewers.

I have created a public link to the document on my Google Sites webpage, so that anybody who visits the webpage can download the file. And I have tried logging out of my Google account, and downloading the file, which shows no sign of my name. But I would just like to double check that if anybody downloads this file, they will definitely not be able to know my identity (e.g. my Google account name). I know that there may be ways to find out the document's author by looking in the meta-data, but I have been careful with this already. I am specifically interested to know if there is any loss of anonymity by sharing the link through Google Drive.

Here are the specific steps I took to make the document available for download:

  1. Created a Google Sites webpage
  2. Created a document called "test_document.pdf"
  3. Uploaded this document to my Google Drive
  4. In Google Drive, after clicking on this document, I did Share->Get Link->Anyone on the internet with this link can view->Copy link.
  5. In my Google Sites webpage, I create text saying "Download document here"
  6. After highlighting this text, I clicked on "Insert link".
  7. I then pasted the link from before.

When viewing the webpage, you can then click on the "Download document here" text, and it downloads the document, and saves is as file "test_document.pdf".

John Rowlay
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    When you make users download the file on your Google Drive of your account, the users can see your email address of Gmail and the display name from the file ID. If you don't want to show them, how about using the service account? [Ref](https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/understanding-service-accounts) When the service account is used, I think that those information is not shown. How about this? I post this as a comment because I'm not sure about the direction you expect. – Tanaike Aug 05 '20 at 08:21
  • Thanks for your comment. The service account could be a good option. However, you say that users can see my email address from the file ID, but the link URL is just a list of random letters and numbers, e.g. https://drive.google.com/file/d/19fji38foinfi3nf083f99f8393/view. And if you download the file, the name of the file is just whatever I call it in my Google Drive (which I can just give a generic name to). So I don't know what you mean by users being able to see my email address... – John Rowlay Aug 05 '20 at 08:29
  • If you give them access to the file, they could possibly check the creator and the owner of the file. For example, in Docs they would just need to click `File > Document details`. In this case, I think using a service account would be a good solution to ensure anonymity. But to make sure that's the case, could you provide more information about how the files are shared and how they are embedded into the Sites page? – Iamblichus Aug 05 '20 at 09:02
  • Thanks, I have added some further information to my original post. – John Rowlay Aug 05 '20 at 09:23

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I have found the answer myself, which is Yes, downloading a document from Google Drive can reveal the document's owner. If you open the document within the Google Drive environment, and then click on the three buttons, then click on Details, it reveals who the owner is. If you just download the file without inspecting the details within Google Drive, then it doesn't reveal the owner, but I don't know how to force a direct download without allowing somebody to open the file within Google Drive.

John Rowlay
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