3
votes

I have been playing around with GWT and GWT Visualization Wrapper API. One thing I learned recently is that GWT Visualization API does not work without an internet connection (I was working offline the other day and it took me a good half hour to figure out why my charts were not loading)

After doing a lot of reading online about privacy, data, and GWT, it seems that many people, including me, have a concern about sending data to Google when trying to display graphs. I already searched through many sources, including stackoverflow, and I would like to 100% confirm that my assumptions are correct.

The reason for people's concern about sending data to Google was when you tried to get an image of the said chart. This required data to be sent to Google, they processed it, and then they returned an image to be embedded in your website. According to my studies, that feature has been deprecated from Google charts (and for good reason). The way it works now, to my understanding, is that every time you want to display a chart, you download the most up-to-date library on the client side and perform all the calculations on the client. This makes it so that Google doesn’t actually get any information you will display on the charts.

Thus, I can continue using the visualization API as long as I keep using interactive charts and keep checking on the Google charts documentation page that it says that for this particular chart i.e Line Chart:

https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/linechart

(SEE BOTTOM OF PAGE) “All code and data are processed and rendered in the browser. No data is sent to any server” I do not have to worry about anyone getting my data because all information is processed client side.

Please correct any incorrect assumptions that I may have. Thank you.

1
+1 on query. Can you also add the article links for reference? - appbootup

1 Answers

1
votes

The charts on this page, https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery, all include a "Data Policy" section which details whether the chart is rendered on the client and what data will leave the client. Currently, only GeoChart communicates with Google (in order to do the Geocoding); obviously, this could change in the future.

The charts on this other page, https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/more_charts, include some that were written by Google, and some that were written by third parties. These also include a Data Policy section. For those written by Google, you can rely on this policy. For those written by third parties, Google has not validated the claims and cannot guarantee them.