Update authentication and associated policies to comply with Google's requirements

[anjackson]

Quoting from here:

A while ago, we experimented with an add-on for Google Sheets that provided a way to query web archive holdings from an online spreadsheet (this COPTR link provides some additional information).

Unfortunately, this has become unavailable due to a particular kind of digital obsolescence: changes to Google’s policies. To make it work again, we have to modify our formal policies and documentation in a way that meets Google’s specific requirements. Realistically, due to other work taking priority, it’s likely to be some time before we are able to look at restoring it.

Google's add-on management and deployment systems are pretty complex, not just in terms of technology, but also administratively and in terms of policy requirements.

Here's a specific example (one that represents the point where I gave up trying to make this work!): Google requires a link to a privacy policy for them to review, and to present to users. Furthermore, they enforce the constraint that this policy must be at a URL that is the same host as is associated with the other services. The UK Web Archive operates from a separate domain to our parent organisation, but operates under our parent organisation's privacy policy. To make things work, we'd likely have to operate this as a service hosted out of the main BL domain, but that makes things massively more complex to manage internally.

(The underlying issue here seems to be that by operating a web service integrated with Sheets, we effectively have access to user data, so we have to meet certain criteria. We really do not want any private user data, but it's hard to find a way to integrate with these tools that means we guarantee we don't. But even just understanding these issues burns a lot of time.)

All this additional complexity means managing and maintaining this Google Sheets is beyond our capabilities at present. We are open to hearing about ways to cope with this, or perhaps ways of empowering users so they can do this kind of thing themselves e.g. via APIs or other standard integration patterns.