Some blogs have squawked about terms of service that state Google Drive reserves the right to "use" some users' files.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Users want to know why Google Drive seemed to be claiming ownership of customers' files
- As it turns out, the company claims no ownership -- it says so right in the terms of service
- But a public file on any of Google's services could, in theory, end up in promotional materials
As it turns out, the
company claims no ownership -- it says so right in the terms of service.
And a comparison between Google Drive's terms and that of other storage
services turns up few material differences, except for a couple of
questionable terms that may land your content in Google's promotional
materials.
In a comparison piece, The Verge noted that the terms of service from four major cloud storage services -- Dropbox, iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive, and Google Drive -- all claim no ownership of the files you give them.
Several publishing
outfits raised the alarm about a clause in Google's terms of service
that states Google reserves the right to "use, host, store, reproduce,
modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from
translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content
works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform,
publicly display and distribute" content uploaded to their services.
But as The Verge pointed
out, other services have similarly expansive, and sometimes more
expansive, terms, and those services mean only to use them in service
of, well, the services.
When we spoke to the
Electronic Frontier Foundation about Google Drive's terms of service,
the EFF found little about them that was more suspicious than in any
other similar cloud service. But Rebecca Jeschke, EFF's media relations
director and digital rights analyst, paused over one phrase: "The rights
you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating,
promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones."
Promoting?
Google's unified privacy policy
states that it won't use your material to do anything other than
"provide, maintain, protect and improve [its services], [and] to develop
new ones," and will ask for consent before lending your material to any
other uses.
But if a file is set as
publicly available, that is considered consent for use to promote
Google's services. If a user uploads a photo and sets it as publicly
viewable, that picture could end up in an ad for Google.
The good news here is
that Google isn't going to be strewing your personal files all over the
Internet as banner ads, as the terms of service alone might suggest,
provided the files have some privacy settings, as they do by default --
viewable only to friends, for instance.
But a public file on any
of Google's services could, in theory, end up in promotional materials.
It makes some sense that public content could be used by others, but
it's easy to forget how public "Public" on an Internet service is. It
gives us flashbacks to the family photo posted on a blog that wound up in a Czech ad.
Jeschke went on to point
out that users should be more concerned with who Google might be forced
to give their files to, than what Google itself might do with their
files.
"In light of Megaupload, it's possible that users are worried about the wrong thing," she said.
Files stored in the
cloud can still be easily lost or subpoenaed without the users'
knowledge, Jeschke noted, an issue that's often overlooked.
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