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Google Updates Chrome's Terms of Service
centuren writes "In response to the reaction to Chrome's terms of service, Google has truncated the offending Section 11, apologizing for the oversight. The new Section 11 contains only the first sentence included in their Universal Terms of Service, now stating: 'You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.'"
Its icon looks like an anal bead.
So far we've gotten an apology and a quick amendment that eliminates the offending clause. Now we just need for the group responsible for the oversight to be fired and one or two sacrificial killings and we'll call it even.
I'm a big tall mofo.
relinquish rights to the stuff that may have been created before the update?
If you uninstall Chrome, it leaves a few google'isms behind...
Like googleupdate and a few other registry entries... /sigh...
time to reload Winbloze...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
No, the OP had it right, its just an "outbreak"... saying a sudden outbreak is redundant.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/outbreak
Main Entry:
outbreak
Function:
noun
Date:
1602
1 a: a sudden or violent increase in activity or currency
b: a sudden rise in the incidence of a disease
c: a sudden increase in numbers of a harmful organism and especially an insect within a particular area
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+outbreak
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/outbreak
etc, etc...
See.... nobody, not even Google themselves ever reads the freakin' legal boilerplate crap you have to click on to install software.
It's open source. Just remove the terms of service and recompile.
So basically you're saying it doesn't pass Mirosoft application certification procedures?
What a surprise.
How we know is more important than what we know.
They took the standard EULA that they use for everything, and slapped it on - it was the easiest thing for the programmers to do at the time, no thought required, just use the standard legal mumbo-jumbo. An understandable mistake, and they've corrected it.
Can't we have a legal system that would just dismiss something so rediculous and unreasonable??? You know, something to protect the people?? They could have put "by agreeing, we will assume the deed to your house", and I'm sure the number of downloads wouldn't have changed.
Umm, nice try troll. It was a genuine concern. The clause had the potential to be a huge land grab. It's hard to say whether it was an accident or they really got the message but it's been fixed. It's not the only time it's happened. I seem to remember both Apple and MS trying that sort of thing in the past, it's a bit easier to believe that Google just made a mistake though.
Firefox users are not going to switch to Chrome. It's just inane to suggest that's the case. It doesn't run on anything other than Windows at this point, and it looks like it's going to be a pain to be ported to anything else.
On the resource side of things, they're going to have to make a significant amount of improvement to be competitive with Firefox on performance. Sure web surfing is apparently faster, but that's against the 3.0 release and neglects the impact of memory hogging and the tweaks coming down the pipe in 3.1.
Or to put it another way, it's premature to suggest that Chrome is going to be stealing Firefox users. More likely they'll be stealing IE users away. Might very well slow adoptin of Firefox, but it's unlikely to make a significant impact.
Umm, that's what a boilerplate is for. For pretty much any other service they have it would have been fine. Or at least in keeping with the competition.
The only reason why it's a problem is because this is one of like two things they're providing where it's not appropriate. Google has a much larger number of projects for which a clause like that is pretty much mandatory to provide the service.
Almost any software program does that, why? Because the Windows registry is an absolute pain. Its like saying that apt-get remove still leaves some files behind. Unfortunately there isn't an apt-get purge function for Windows.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Well that sounds reasonable.
Whenever a company can alter a previous agreement, declare all changes retroactive, and require me visit a webpage constantly as the method of notification, then reasonable is the first word that springs to my mind too.
All this is scaremongering. Your confidential business data, bank account details, personal preferences in pornography, medical records and DNA sequence are strictly a matter between you and Google's marketing department, and no-one else. Remember, they're not evil!
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Did you file a bug?
The thing is, the language itself was not the most offensive part of this.
What is most offensive is the way these bastards write these absurdly one-sided "agreements", assuming the benefit that if anything is unenforceable it will only selectively be struck, and just pass off their standard shit with every single product assuming nobody will ever read it.
Good thing we have the internets to call them on it this time, but shame on them for doing it in the first place. And not just google, but damn near every tech company. The only reason they fixed it was because the high profile of the product. It's still evil.
Hmmm, let's see...
1. Loudly complain about annoying features in the beta stage
2. Watch as company removes said features because they're in vulnerable position
3. Rinse and repeat on other products
4. Realize why so many corporations fight for control of the media
5. Start your own local newspaper
6. ?
7. Go out of business because nobody reads newspapers anymore, you moron
That's not the only thing that prevents Firefox users from using chrome. The other two big things are the lack of add-ons and Windows exclusivity, both subject to change. As soon as Chrome has a decent enough equivalent to Adblock and Noscript, and maybe better keyboard-only navigation, I'll be all over it.
The cynics may say that they only backed down from their powergrab due to the media attention, the optimists may say that they did it because Google always listen to their customers, and the rest of us may not care *why* they did it, either way we finally get a cool new browser to play with, without risking our privacy in the process, and there's one less stupid EULA in this world.
Now, if only Apple would let me use iTunes to develop biological WMDs...
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
while yes, that was implied, I was actually stating that google left major chunks behind, running and collecting information to send to the mothership...
most applications may end up leaving an abandoned entry in the registry - not full paths in your local applications area, with entries in the startup....
ie - and to a poster further down... yes - I submitted a bug report regarding the uninstall that didn't actually uninstall....
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Corporations just don't copy and past legal stuff -- EVER.
As a past member of three corporate legal departments, I'm ROFL at this quote. Most contracts start as boilerplate and only get changed through negotiation between the parties.
Spamming every news and discussion board on the Net with fake hysterics over that simple cut and paste mistake was the only thing the Firefox fans could try to do to stop the flood of people dumping Firefox for Chrome?
I still can't picture Chrome actually causing a 'flood' of people instantaneously dumping any browser. It's neat, but not that exciting.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I have a copy of the PC game Morrowind whose EULA explicitly prevents me from using it.
I'm pretty sure it's down to copy-paste.
Yes, I agree. Google employs many lawyers. One of them MUST have signed off on the TOS before it went live. This was a conscious decision. Corporations just don't copy and past legal stuff -- EVER. Someone in Google liked the original TOS.
Kinda doubt it. Lawyers are rarely involved in the quality and release process. Not unless there is a debate or concern and they are called in by someone more involved with the product.
They would have certainly approved a boilerplate at some point, and would usually be called in if someone actually noticed the problem and wanted to modify it. But I have never heard of any tech company including legal in the test and release process as a standard practice.
Also, getting marketing, testers and developers to review doc is usually like pulling teeth. They would almost never more than glance at a EULA, warranty statement or something like that.
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
I've used nothing but Firefox for years.
I switched to Chrome, and I'm not looking back. It's that much better.
So, it's stolen *one* Firefox user.
I'm running xp-64 and run Chrome just fine.
Math is like sex. People who get it are popular in class, people who don't are not.
Chrome works just fine for me on Vista64 and integrates very slickly with Aero Glass. If you look at the build requirements it lists the Vista SDK, so frankly I'd be pretty amused if it didn't work on on Vista.
What are you smoking. I am running Chrome on Vista fine.
Its nice to be important but its more important to be nice
Then you apparently didn't make much use of plugins.
i tried Google chrome for 4 hrs, then i saw that everything was logged !!
uninstalled & they asked why ?!
I typed STOP COLLECTING MY DATA,,
back Firefox. at least i can reduce the amount of data that are being used via gmail or other g services.
ex of Google analytic options:
*** Share my Google Analytics data...
With other Google products only
Enable enhanced ad features and an improved experience with AdWords, AdSense and other Google products
by sharing your website's Google Analytcs data with other Google services.
only Google services (no third parties) will be able to access your data.
*** Anonymously with Google and others
Enable benchmarking by sharing your website data in an anonymous form. Google will remove all identifiable information about your website,
combine the data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable industries and report aggregate trends in the benchmarking service.
I used AdBlock Plus, Pennypacker, and FxIF.
But Chrome is so much better I can live without those for the time being.
... is why there are legal types out there that continue to slip these clauses or sections into legal agreements in the first place. Are they really that stupid that they think that as many times as these terms have been ferreted out and publicized that anyone is going to think "well, okay, I guess it's all right this time"? They don't understand that there enough people on the Internet that there will never be a time when there's no one looking for and exposing these sort of legal shenanigans.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I uninstalled chrome for this exact reason and posted it in the "more info" box and said "retaining rights to everything created in the browser violates the 'Do No Evil' policy"
I'm still not interested in installing it because they didn't change the bit about how they can send all usage data to them for monitoring, and that's just a bit too scary when you realize Eric Schmidt regularly meets with the head of the NSA.
Firefox users are not going to switch to Chrome. It's just inane to suggest that's the case. It doesn't run on anything other than Windows at this point, and it looks like it's going to be a pain to be ported to anything else.
The vast majority of Firefox users are running Windows. I don't see the lack of other platforms making much difference here.
Or to put it another way, it's premature to suggest that Chrome is going to be stealing Firefox users. More likely they'll be stealing IE users away. Might very well slow adoptin of Firefox, but it's unlikely to make a significant impact.
The factor you seem to be ignoring is that Firefox users are more likely to be early adopters. So I think they are more likely to at least try Chrome.
Why is there an EULA in the first place? The only difference between Google Chrome and Chromium is a build switch, so anyone can reject the EULA and compile their own versions, even if they can't redistribute the Chrome builds due to trademarks.
The BSD licence includes a disclaimer from liability when using the software, so no EULA is required for this. Google's online services have an EULA when you use them, but this isn't necessary for an open source browser.
Maybe, Google are concerned about their privacy policy, when consent is required for data to be collected on users. And Section 10.2 of the EULA isn't required for an open source browser, so it's possible for Chrome to include closed source code in the future, which the BSD licence permits.
This makes me feel uneasy about using Chrome. I hope that Google don't get so caught up in collecting information on users, that they miss focusing on building a good browser.
If you use Privoxy you can have Chrome with ad blocking as well. Works like a charm for me. Credit to this blog for pointing me in the right direction.
Denny
Erecting the wall of separation between church and state is absolutely essential in a free society. - Thomas Jefferson
The Chrome browser binary you can download is *based* on the Chromium source code, which is free (see http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-instructions-windows on instructions how to compile). The Chrome browser itself is NOT under the BSD license. I was quite disappointed when I realized that. - Just because they say "open source" somewhere doesn't make the Chrome browser itself open source.
;)
And what's this "installer" program to download the browser for you, why not just give us a download link to the browser itself? Furthermore, the browser will also *update* anytime it feels like it. Afaik there's no way to deactivate this *feature*.
I'd love to see a site dedicated to compiling daily builds of the Chromium source code, maybe through in some forks by private fiddlers, because right now following the instructions from the link requires you to use a non open source tool "gclient" to download about 500MB of source and then compile it using M$ Visual Studio - and then hope it produces a working binary (oh, and have the time for this). So far I couldn't find anyone doing this and putting the binaries online yet - not even using google
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Urgh. You may be using a different Windows to me. Let me describe my last 24 hours in 5 sentences:
- Uninstalled Visual Studio 2005.
- Installed Visual Studio 2008 overnight.
- Launch VS2008 to start a C# project; this fails, and VS2008 tells me I need to install it *again*.
- Open the add/remove programs control panel, and click "Uninstall/change" on VS2008.
- VS2008's update program crashes before giving me any options.
I'm now wedged without a development environment, losing time and money, because of this "EXCELLENT" installer system. If I have to reinstall Vista to get past this, I'll be *most* displeased.
Unfortunately google is one of the companies that thinks everything must be always done there way and hence the inevitable mess they left behind.
Using this statement to defend Microsoft is unbelievably ironic.
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
Good job Google, now I will actually give your browser a whirl.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Why's isn't Chrome's source readily available? Instead, "Chromium", the OSS project that Chrome is "based off of", is open. That's a distinct difference to me. Is no one else skeptical?
Oh, for the love of God. Either you believe that they're actually providing the source or you don't. If Google was explicitly saying that this was the Chrome source code, you'd be crying, "But how do we know that's the source they really built it from????". Ridiculous.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
IMO this is evidence that Google has not developed any kind of interesting OS, otherwise the Linux version would have been out first. WHY?
Any OS developed by Google would surely be non-windows based and likely linux-based with their intimate development expertise on that platform.
With independent processes running each tab, and a lightning fast JS execution engine, the logical approach for OS development would be an active-desktopesque interface for KDE or Enlightenment or Gnome etc.
Instead of having multiple desktops (which hardly anyone uses these days when u factor in mainstream use) you could have a multiple tabbed interface as default. Eg. user logs into OS and default is online javascript enriched interface on the default tab (which could be a static tab)
Instead of other desktops - other tabs - all this WOULD be the desktop in JavaScript form, and it could access all OS features, eg. xterm, etc. but it wouldn't need to access the browser as this desktop would effectively be the browser - some form of Chrome.
Moreover, the initial desktop would be highly customizable. A user could log in and immediately have a JavaScript enriched desktop tab with a google earth FRAME ebbedded in it, a google map FRAME embedded in it and a conventional HTTP FRAME embedded in it.
The HTTP frame would be smaller than a conventional window and could be zoomed in and dragged around like in the ipod. This together with a Chrome version of Mozilla labs' Ubiquity (Ubiquity allows for streamlined net use -ie easily embedding a google map in a email and having it sent to your address book etc.) would provide a really excellent OS experience.
But, if I thought of this then I'd say google labs did too, and there IS NO Linux version of Chrome yet so I must assume they are not far along in their desire to develop and OS, or at least an OS interface like KDE etc.
IF, Chrome had been delivered first as an alternative to KDE, Gnome etc, I'd be excited but I don't think their utilizing / want to utilize it in this manner as yet.
Paul