Thelen Lab is a private home lab operated by one person for their own use. The only Google account whose data it ever touches is the operator's own. There are no other users, no customers, and no third parties.
This policy is a statement of fact about a single-operator system, not a template. It describes precisely what the lab's Google API clients do.
What is accessed, and why
Signing in (OpenID Connect)
Several self-hosted applications in the lab use Sign in with Google rather than keeping their own passwords. When the operator signs in, each application receives and stores three things in its own local database:
- the email address on the Google account, used to decide whether the person signing in is allowed in at all;
- the display name, shown in the application's own interface;
- the account's stable subject identifier (
sub), used to recognise the same account on the next sign-in.
That is the whole of it. No other profile fields are requested, and this data is not shared with anyone.
Google Drive
The lab runs rclone to keep a personal
Obsidian notes vault synchronised, in both directions,
between a disk in the rack and a folder in the operator's own Google Drive.
This uses the Google Drive API under the drive scope.
The files involved are the operator's own notes. They are copied between the operator's own Drive and the operator's own hardware, and nowhere else. They are not read by any person other than the operator, not sent to any third party, not used to train any model, and not processed by any service outside the lab.
Where the data lives
On self-hosted hardware in a private residence, backed up to storage controlled by the same operator. Access to the applications is restricted to the home network and an explicit allow-list of one email address.
OAuth tokens are held as secrets on that cluster and are never committed to source control.
What never happens
- Google user data is never sold, and never transferred to anyone for advertising, credit assessment, lending, or any similar purpose.
- It is never used to train generalised or personalised AI or ML models.
- It is never read by a human other than the operator, except where required by law, or as narrowly needed for a security investigation of the operator's own systems.
- There are no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels, and no cookies on this website. The applications themselves set a session cookie so that a sign-in persists; that cookie is read only by the lab.
Limited Use
Thelen Lab's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.
Retention and removal
Sign-in details persist for as long as the corresponding account exists in a given application, and are deleted when that account is deleted. Synchronised notes persist until the operator deletes them.
Access granted to these clients can be withdrawn at any time from Google Account permissions. Doing so stops all further access immediately.
Changes
If what the lab does with Google data changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about data the lab holds: privacy@thelenlab.com