The privacy risk for GSB in general is that you are sharing URLs with a (trusted) third party. That's most acute with the REST API, but most implementations (in

The privacy risk for GSB in general is that you are sharing URLs with a (trusted) third party. That's most acute with the REST API, but most implementations (including gsb4ugc) cache a local copy of the lookup tables and so don't actually send URLs to Google. There is still a very occasional need to send a link to Google for validation, but in the server-side case the only context Google has for the request is the IP address of the server, which minimizes privacy risks as much as possible.