are google forms privacy-Preserving?

Question

Is google form a Privacy-Preserving way to conduct a survey? some people are not comfortable with it. Is it because most people have a google account and if they do not go on private mode, they give more information about themselves to google? does google use the responses?

Answer 1

No.

The contents of google forms (which usually feed into google spreadsheets) is shared between the submitters (only their own data, obviously), you as the form owner, and the entirety of google's internal infrastructure.

Google using the data directly would be a really major infraction, just as it would be if they acted on the contents of a gmail account, however, they have plenty of scope to use the information in indirect, less-obvious ways. For example, the data that someone submits in a form could be used on other sites for ad targeting. Google does this in gmail; if someone sends you an email about something, you can expect to see ads on that subject both within gmail and on other sites. To be fair, they may have stopped that particular practice, but the wider point is that you really can't tell.

"Private mode" is irrelevant in this case; it gives very little protection to start with, and if a form requires you to be logged in to a google account, they know exactly who you are anyway.

On top of this you have the problems caused by the Schrems II judgement that effectively made it illegal to store any personal data (in the GDPR sense) in the US about people in the EU. Prior to this judgement, Google relied on the Privacy Shield arrangement and "Standard Contractual Clauses" (SCCs) to allow this. Privacy Shield is simply dead, and while SCCs are valid in general, they are not usable in the US (though both Google and Facebook have been trying to gaslight to the contrary) because the ongoing lack of US federal privacy laws and the persistent overreach of US security agencies renders it impossible to make their claims valid. This is unlikely to change in the near future.