Monday, July 23, 2012

Keep this in mind as you use Google Forms

It was recently brought to my attention that it is a violation of Google's Terms of Service to collect any personal information using Google Forms.  This includes usernames, passwords and email addresses.  Basically, Google prohibits you from asking people to provide you with a username, password or email address on a Google Form.  If a Google bot finds that you are in violation of the terms, your form will be locked and all your data frozen.  The only way to get it back is to post to a public Google forum to ask for assistance.

You can read CoolCatTeacher's blog post about it here.

The good news is that, as Google Apps for Education users, we don't really have any need to collect personal information from anyone at BMS using a form we have created.  Google Apps for Education users have the option, when they create a form, of automatically collecting the person's username and email address, thereby restricting the form to only BMS users.  This will work well in nearly all scenarios with students, faculty and staff, as they all have BMS accounts and can sign in to complete your form. Any other questions that you may ask people to answer, such as: voting on a topic, taking a quiz, or signing up for an activity are perfectly acceptable ways of using Google Forms.

The only time that you should be mindful of this rule is if you are collecting information from people outside of BMS using a Google Form, as you will not be able to automatically capture their email addresses.  Just be sure not to ask them for their email address in the form and you should be in the clear.

If you have any questions, just ask...you can post a comment below.



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