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Privacy Advocates Slam Google Drive's Privacy Policies
DJRumpy writes "Privacy advocates voiced strong concerns this week over how data stored on Google Drive may be used during and after customers are actively engaged in using the cloud service. While the TOS for Dropbox and Microsoft both state they will use your data only as far as is necessary to provide the service you have requested, Google goes a bit farther: 'Google's terms of use say: "You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours. When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content."'
"a close and careful reading reveals that Google's terms are pretty much the same as anyone else's, and slightly better in some cases"
http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2973849/google-drive-terms-privacy-data-skydrive-dropbox-icloud
it's in my head
They don't sell your data to customers, that would be illegal. They look at your data and use it to build a description of your personality and then they sell the fact that they know your personality to advertisers.
Doesn't explain why they need rights to distribute and create derivative works.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Doesn't explain why they need rights to distribute and create derivative works.
Creating a thumbnail or a document preview would constitute a derivative work. Displaying it on your browser would be distribution.
Conveniently left out of the summary and TFA is that this only applies to DATA YOU EXPLICITLY MAKE PUBLIC in your Google Drive.
Which is the same policy as Google Docs had, same as Picasa had, etc.
If you mark a document public then it can be searched for and found. (But in my tests, its rarely searchable - probably my stuff is too boring even for Google's spiders).
Foremost in Google's policy it states:
Information we share
We do not share personal information with companies, organizations and individuals outside of Google unless one of the following circumstances apply:
With your consent
We will share personal information with companies, organizations or individuals outside of Google when we have your consent to do so. We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information.
So if you mark it private, it means its almost as private as it can be while still being in the cloud. Of course Google has to honor subpoenas, but your next great novel will not appear in someone's search results if mark it private.
If you want better privacy for your commercial cloud storage your best bet is SpiderOak which stores everything encrypted with an encryption key that even SpiderOak doesn't know. They use client-side decryption, and therefore couldn't hand over your stuff even at gunpoint.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Because you have the option to share your documents publicly. Creating and sharing a really popular document might warrant automatic translation by Google into other languages so that other regions, too, can read your public document. That translation is an example of Google creating and distributing a derivative work.
OK, well, not all that shocked.
Whoever doesn't realize by now that Google is a marketing agency who makes their money off selling their users' data, deserves to get screwed.
Google makes zero money off selling their users' data. Selling their users data would, in fact, hurt Google's business strategy.
Google makes money off having access to users' data nobody else does. They can tell an advertiser, "we know the people for whom your ad will be most relevant, and no other advertising company has that information." If they were to actually give a list of said users to their client, they'd no longer be able to charge for advertising to those users, because their clients would do it directly.
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license 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 such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.
It is incredibly intellectually dishonest to quote only part of a paragraph, without noting the limitation that immediately follows. You can still have problems with the terms (the note on "promoting [and] developing new [services]", especially) Materially, Google's terms seem to be in the same vein as Dropbox's: they need to be able to actually, you know, host your data to be able to actually host your data. But if you want to actually discuss their policies, don't quote them partially out of context. That doesn't help.
I particularly love how people in that article subtly imply that Google is going to sell your data, without actually coming out and saying it (“You have to ask yourself, what’s the business model. If the business model is to make money from a service or money from advertising, that’s one thing. If it’s trying to make money off the sale of data, that’s another thing.” Implying evil behavior is much easier than coming out with an actual accusation: the former requires zero proof.) Google's terms make it pretty clear they can't do that ("You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content"), and even if they change the terms later, they can still be sued for selling the data since it was uploaded under the existing terms. IANAL, of course, but Google is in enough hot water already that it would be practically suicidal (and extremely stupid) to do that.
Oh, and BTW the relevant quote is from their "Terms of Service". Their privacy policies are an entirely different page, so the headline is incorrect: this isn't about their privacy policies, it's about their terms of service. The privacy policies themselves aren't actually discussed in TFA, although they are referenced.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Dropbox:
I have bolded the relevant bit that the biased summary failed to include. It is exactly the same as the Microsoft term above.
No, not it is not. There is a huge difference between Microsoft's (The Service) and Google (Our Services). If Google decided to come out with a new service where they allowed you to search anyones documents on their site, you've already agreed to it. With Microsoft, you have not. Is it a glaring omission in the biased summary? Yes. But does it mean that your stuff will only be used for operating,promoting and improving Google Drive? No. No it does not. When Google collects it and starts distributing your family photos as part of GIS, you've already agreed to it.
..well.. for starters, they're asking for more rights than you usually as a content buyer have.
got an mp3? pretty certain even if you bought it legally that you don't have the right to publicly "perform" it(thanks artist associations and your monopolies!).
they're wording it as a worldwide license for them and their partners to publicly display your data and you're asking why the privacy orgs are barking at them?? wth?? note that they could word the whole service so that it's you who are serving the things to whoever you want by using their service instead of this way of them doing everything.
also I would think this to be a bad choice that opens them to lawsuits, since it's now _google_ doing the re-publishing of the file worldwide if you distribute an illegal mp3 through them.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
And legalese is legalese because lawyers are assholes and will nail you for any omission, inconsistency or inaccuracy.
Or erroneousness, mistakenness, fallaciousness, faultiness, inexactness, mistake, fallacy, slip, slip-up, oversight, fault, blunder, gaffe; erratum, solecism; informal howler, typo, blooper, goof,exception; deletion, cut, excision, elimination, erasure; gap, blank, or absence.
You didn't even really get started.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Simply encrypt everything you keep on Google Drive...I'll bet a company that came out with a cheap, easy to use tool to automate encrypting all data to/from these cloud storage setups, could make some money off said tool....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........