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Reading Google Chrome's Fine Print

Posted by kdawson on Wed Sep 03, 2008 04:03 AM
from the here-be-tygers dept.
Privacy Businesses Google The Internet
Much ink and many electrons are being spilled over Google's Chrome browser (discussed here twice in recent days): from deep backgrounders to performance benchmarks to its vulnerability to a carpet-bombing flaw. The latest angle to be explored is Chrome's end-user license agreement. It does not look consumer-friendly. "By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services."
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Submission: Be sure to read Chrome's fine print by burnitdown (1076427)
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[+] The 5 Most Laughable Terms of Service On the Net 399 comments
nicholas.m.carlson writes "According to these five terms of service and EULA, Google owns any content you create using its Chrome browser and can filter your Gmail messages if it likes. Facebook says it can sell its users' uploaded images as stock photography. YouTube can keep footage of your kids forever, even after you've deleted it from the site. And AOL can ban you for using vulgar language on AIM. Funny, right? That's why Valleywag calls them 'The 5 most laughable terms of service on the Net.'" Reader dlaudel writes, regarding the previously-mentioned Google EULA for Chrome, "According to Ars Technica, Google's EULA for Chrome was just copy-and-pasted from its EULA for other services, a practice that is apparently common at Google."
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Reading Google Chrome's Fine Print 50 Comments More /

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  • This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Informative)

    by DrEldarion (114072) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:08AM (#24856261) Homepage

    I doubt this has anything to do with Chrome. It's taken straight out of their Google Accounts terms: https://www.google.com/accounts/TOS?hl=en [google.com]

    See point 11.1.

    • Re:This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Swizec (978239) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:14AM (#24856283) Homepage
      There's a difference between having an EULA for google services and an EULA for google browser and they should be different. I can understand anything I upload to google being google's property henceforth, but anything I upload using their browser? Basically ... if I use their browser anything I do online becomes their property ... how is that good for me or anyone?

      This is yet another sign of google's impending world domination. Won't be long before they own everything people use from software, to clothes, to spouses and children.

      • Re:This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Informative)

        by FilterMapReduce (1296509) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:29AM (#24856353)

        Google has announced that Chrome is to be open source. If this has the conventional meaning of being licensed under an OSI-approved license, or anything remotely resembling one, then a EULA would be redundant and unenforceable. (Even if Google tried to exercise some implicit contractual terms around the use of Chrome, someone could simply exercise the permissions given under the open source license to repackage the code under a different name with no EULA.)

        I'm not going to RTFA at this hour, but the only reasonable interpretation is that the terms in question apply only to Google's services and not the browser software itself. Anything else would be audacious even for a company without Google's mostly good reputation.

      • Re:This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rugatero (1292060) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:49AM (#24856437)

        Basically ... if I use their browser anything I do online becomes their property ... how is that good for me or anyone?

        Actually the terms say that you grant a royalty-free licence, not ownership. It's still an unacceptable condition, but I feel the distinction is important.

          • Re:This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Simon Brooke (45012) <stillyet@googlemail.com> on Wednesday September 03 2008, @06:47AM (#24857051) Homepage Journal

            In the modern day that is, sadly, merely a semantic difference. If someone has a royalty-free licence to do anything with something they might as well own it and it woudln't make any difference to them or the author.

            You might want to look up 'semantic' in a dictionary. It means the opposite of what you think it means.

              • Re:This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Insightful)

                by RiotingPacifist (1228016) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @07:33AM (#24857395)

                are we talking about slashdot

                With respect to text or data entered into and stored by publicly-accessible site features such as forums, comments and bug trackers ("SourceForge Public Content"), the submitting user retains ownership of such SourceForge Public Content; with respect to publicly-available statistical content which is generated by the site to monitor and display content activity, such content is owned by SourceForge. In each such case, the submitting user grants SourceForge the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license.

                or google:

                By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.

          • Re:This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Insightful)

            by juhaz (110830) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @08:30AM (#24858009) Homepage

            It's perfectly acceptable for a web service - they all have similar clauses - and granting them some rights is even necessary, my post is intended to be public, and they do need to permission to show it to others.

            It's certainly not acceptable for a browser to do with private data.

            Do you really fail to see the difference, or are you just building strawmen for fun?

      • Re:This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Idaho (12907) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @05:02AM (#24856525)

        There's a difference between having an EULA for google services and an EULA for google browser and they should be different.

        Here is the privacy policy for Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/privacy.html [google.com]

        It does not mention the terms in this article, which clearly seem related to google services and not the browser.

        Mind you, the privacy policy does mention unique ID's for each browser, and sending them to google every time you start the browser. Also, Chrome automatically installs a GoogleUpdate executable and adds it to your autoruns; I really hate it when applications do that. So it's still pretty bad, but not in exactly the way this "article" makes it out to be.

        • Re:This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Kagura (843695) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @06:00AM (#24856789)
          Google Earth and potentially other programs install the Google Updater, too. I've come to expect this from other applications, but it takes me totally by surprise from Google, and I'm not just being petty. That said, I don't interfere with the Google Updater, because overall I want all my Google applications kept easily up to date. There are enough of them (Google Earth/Desktop/Chrome) that it is nicer to have an autoupdater keeping track.

        • Re:This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by MacroRex (548024) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @06:03AM (#24856813)

          The privacy policy is not relevant, the EULA is.

          I work for a small codeshop that does (among other things) document management applications. Our apps have a browser-based UI, and if I'm reading the EULA right, any information (including documents etc.) used with our apps are automatically licensed to Google if the user uses Chrome.

          IANAL and I hope I'm wrong, because otherwise I can't see how Chrome could be used with business applications at all.

          There's a difference Chrome automatically installs a GoogleUpdate executable and adds it to your autoruns; I really hate it when applications do that.

          StartupMonitor [mlin.net] is your friend.

    • Re:This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Informative)

      by tirerim (1108567) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:17AM (#24856301)
      Even if it's part of their generic license, how it applies to Chrome is still important. What does "submitting, posting, or displaying" even mean in the context of a browser? It seems at least slightly plausible that could be interpreted to include personally generated content that the user views with the browser. I hope that it doesn't really work that way, but I am not a lawyer.

      • Re:This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Funny)

        by hdparm (575302) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:46AM (#24856425) Homepage

        It's really strange stuff. Someone might think that even transfers/deposits one makes while accessing own bank account also belong to Google. Or stuff someone buys on Ebay. Once on-line voting and Chrome become prevalent, Google will also become The President.

        • Re:This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:48AM (#24856433)

          Imagine an even more far fetched scenario - your company uses some kind of web mail. One could abstract that Google have some claim over any emails and attachments you send/receive through Chrome.

          Clearly this is not what Google intend and they have pasted their generic EULA into place until such times as they can afford to pay for a legal representative to write a shiny new one.

    • Re:This is not Chrome-specific. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by minginqunt (225413) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:45AM (#24856419) Homepage Journal

      The frequency of badsummary on this site makes me sad.

      I bet the editors of this site never intended the tag system to be used primarily as a mechanism for drawing attention to their own incompetence.

  • Misread much? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by onlysolution (941392) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:09AM (#24856267)
    It looks to me like the out-of-context excerpts here all pertain to your use of Google's services with Chrome. All of these services state that you agree to let Google use the data you generate so I perhaps these clauses are present in Chrome's EULA to cover your use of their apps in Gears?

    • Re:Misread much? (Score:5, Informative)

      by zby (398682) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @05:13AM (#24856589) Homepage

      Right at the beginning of the EULA you have definition of the word Service - as it is used in that document:

      Google Chrome Terms of Service

      These Terms of Service apply to the executable code version of Google Chrome. Source code for Google Chrome is available free of charge under open source software license agreements at http://code.google.com/chromium/terms.html [google.com].

      1. Your relationship with Google

      1.1 Your use of Googleâ(TM)s products, software, services and web sites (referred to collectively as the âoeServicesâ in this document and excluding any services provided to you by Google under a separate written agreement) is subject to the terms of a legal agreement between you and Google.

      So when in the point 9.1. they use the word 'Service' it clearly means: "products, software, services and web sites" and that includes Chrome.

  • Use Chromium (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:14AM (#24856281)

    I suggest you use the OpenSource version of Chrome , which is BSD licensed and has no EULA you need to agree to.

    I think they made this separation of Chrome and Chromium to keep the "Chrome" brand under their control while still making the browser open source.

    Builds:
    http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/

    Info:
    http://www.chromium.org

    • Re:Use Chromium (Score:5, Insightful)

      by centuren (106470) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @05:34AM (#24856687) Homepage Journal

      Quite right.

      Any specific critiques of interface of licensing seem to be moot in the long run, since the stated goal of this browser is to release better tools for ALL the browsers, including ones that are fully open source.

      There's not much point in arguing how much Google might monitor or claim usage-rights over, as the obvious goal is a backbone for all browsers that makes their applications run better and gives them more potential to develop new ones. Competing with IE and FF doesn't exactly fit well in their business plan.

      The real questions are, if V8 actually does blow all current JS engines away, how soon are we going to see it in a Firefox release? If the independent handling of tabs prove to be the sensible way to handle it, will it make it into FF4?

      If the things Google is introducing are better, V8 should get in there quickly, but multiprocess handling of tabs and plugins, etc, will require quite a bit of work to get into existing browsers.

  • A turn off? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hachiman (68983) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:16AM (#24856293)

    Whilst the auto update feature sort of makes sense (if you discount a malicious user working out how to auto-update an installed copy with their own code), I detest ads, possibly in common with the rest of the world. Ok, it is their revenue, but it's bad enough seeing them on pages, but having them eve more targetted???

    Oh yes, and the autoupdate program (googleupdate.exe) still executes at startup even after Chrome is uninstalled. I know it's a beta, but that's just sloppy.

    Or is it???

    • Re:A turn off? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by antirelic (1030688) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @06:26AM (#24856939) Journal

      I do not so much mind "targeted adds" as much as I mind "add spam". I would love to know about new electronics, new games, new guns, and who the hottest new chick is, but what I dont care about is: making $10000 a month with a home based business, mortgage rates dropping, dancing women on roof tops, or premium life insurance for the elderly. Yes, adds are intrusive, but they provide incentive for people to put up interesting web sites that I like to frequent, without having to charge me a subscription fee (not sure of any other money making model that has succeeded for web sites).

  • adj: Unconscionable (Score:5, Funny)

    by jackb_guppy (204733) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:17AM (#24856303)

    Google lawyers may need to learn a new word that ATT was just taught... Unconscionable

  • So far so good. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Blimey85 (609949) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:18AM (#24856307)
    I'm using it right now just to try it out. I'm a huge Firefox fan and have been for several years now. I started using Firefox back when it was just a beta, long before version 1 finally hit. As a web programmer I think I use Firefox more than any other program and I've really come to like it. It does have a few issues that I'd like to see resolved however, and I think Chrome might be going in the right direction. Memory usage in Firefox is nuts and always has been. After browsing for a couple of hours I can close all tabs and still use nearly 400 megs of memory. That's a serious problem. Sure I can restart Firefox at that point and get the memory back, but I shouldn't need to. Also, when Firefox is using more than 300 megs on my machine, it starts to slow down. I had a gig and a half in my computer so I thought maybe I needed more. I bought another gig and brought my total to 2.5 gigs, yet Firefox still begins to crap out around the 300 meg threshold.

    From the comic it seems like Google really wants to take a new approach to how browsers deal with memory and I think Firefox could learn from that. Is that enough to make me switch? No, not at all. I rely on a number of Firefox extensions and unless Google makes Chrome compatible with Firefox extensions, or comes up with their own system and then develops a tool to auto-port Firefox extensions, I don't think a lot of people are going to switch. Back when I was running 1.5.3 (I think it was .3) and had a number of stability issues I might have given Chrome serious consideration but I only installed it tonight to see what it's all about. When I'm done playing it's back to Firefox I go.

    • Re:So far so good. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BBFire (825138) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:44AM (#24856413)
      Yes! All looking good / working fine here too. Simple no future for me though without AdBlock (or some equivalent).. thought I'd seen the last of those damn smileys forever. "Do no evil".. cmon, it's tantamount to torture nowadays to leave a user unsure if the next tab is going to greet them with a nauseating flash anim or that buzzing noise..

  • jumping to conclusions (Score:5, Informative)

    by speedtux (1307149) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:35AM (#24856385)

    I think you're jumping to conclusions; that is Google's usual "content license", and something they need in order to offer services to you. I don't know how you think it applies to the browser. If you're trying to imply that Google is attempting to claim that everything you do with Chrome belongs to them, you're wrong.

  • forget the fine print - it's phones home like mad (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:41AM (#24856405)

    This thing is lighting up my firewall constantly, during install, operation and uninstall.

    Even after uninstall it leaves GoogleUpdate.exe installed and running and pinging google every hour.

    I'm sticking with Firefox 3.1's javascript compiler instead:
    http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

  • I AM SO HAPPY! (Score:5, Funny)

    by hyperz69 (1226464) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @05:12AM (#24856581)
    This is totally awesome and fair! This is the best thing to happen on the internet! GOOGLE IS THE BEST COMPANY EVER!

    "Posted with Chrome, edited for content by Google"

    • Re:It wont even install for me (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:18AM (#24856305)

      Prepare to be even less impressed and look at the V8 src, they only have codegen for ia32 and arm. Plenty of hardcoded platform specific (windows) guff in the browser codebase too.

      This stuff might have been acceptable in 2003 but it's -DEPIC_FAIL for 2008.

      • guff? (Score:5, Funny)

        by stupidflanders (1230894) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:37AM (#24856395)
        I think... I think he's trying to communicate with us, but I can't quite make out what he's saying.

        • Re:guff? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 03 2008, @04:56AM (#24856481)

          I think... I think he's trying to communicate with us, but I can't quite make out what he's saying.

          Please do feel free to look up [google.com] any short, monosyllabic, four letter words that are above your level of reading comprehension.

          "Growser" is currently Windows only. It's got hard coded registry access and other such retardation throughout the code. Where you might think lib/ the chromium developers think chrome_dll/ and so on.

      • Re:It wont even install for me (Score:5, Funny)

        by Goaway (82658) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @06:02AM (#24856807) Homepage

        Damn them for not making their codebase absolutely perfect from day one! Software should spring into life fully formed, like Athena from Zeus' forehead!

        • Re:It wont even install for me (Score:5, Funny)

          by g0dsp33d (849253) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @07:27AM (#24857343)
          You'll change your mind when Duke Nukem Forever comes out.

        • Re:It wont even install for me (Score:5, Insightful)

          by syousef (465911) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @07:51AM (#24857559) Journal

          Damn them for not making their codebase absolutely perfect from day one! Software should spring into life fully formed, like Athena from Zeus' forehead!

          Actually it should. It's not in vogue right at the moment but it's called testing BEFORE release. Do you really think for more critical stuff that the developers can afford to release untested crap and say "oh well it's beta"? Think of mission critical stuff - aircraft and spacecraft, power industry, telecommunications. Okay a web browser doesn't deserve quite the same level of scrutiny, but obvious bugs should be eliminated on day one. It USe to be common practice to at least try to do so, and failing to do so use to be an embarrassment. Now it's just business as usual. (By the way Google would have a lot more credibility using the term if their "beta" software didn't stay in beta for years)

      • Re:It wont even install for me (Score:5, Funny)

        by PopeRatzo (965947) * on Wednesday September 03 2008, @06:13AM (#24856875) Homepage Journal

        Prepare to be even less impressed and look at the V8 src

        Gosh, you would think this was beta software or something.

        I want my money back.

          • Re:It wont even install for me (Score:5, Funny)

            by InfiniteLoopCounter (1355173) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @07:07AM (#24857175)

            Congratulations - you just set the Slashdot record for the least comprehensible post ever.

            Here, I'll translate that for you:

            (1.000 times 10^100, swap position of o/l, o -> e) has machine language instructions encoded by a compiler which first ran through a preprocessor from some characters saved in a file in physical memory that a lot for the (opposite of hard) + ware on faster than walking on an operating system that has a penguin as a mascot (not technically because Linux is just the kernel, but I will let that slide). It seems [to the GP poster] like half their (not the penguins) stuff they (result of incontinence) through alcoholic beverage.

    • Re:It wont even install for me (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 03 2008, @06:05AM (#24856819)

      Worked fine for me on XP x64. Probably something wrong with your system.

      That said, I uninstalled it immediately due to some big annoyances:

      1) I could not find a download for a local installer, instead it forces you to download an installer stub that downloads and installs the browser.

      2) It did not let me choose where to install it. Instead it automatically installed into documents and settings\user\local settings\application data\google without so much as a prompt.

      3) It added a "Google updater" to my startup programs without asking me if that was ok or even telling me about it.

      4) When I uninstalled it, it didn't remove all of its files and didn't even clean out the startup entry for the aforementioned updater. I had to remove those things manually.

      Sorry Google, I don't like it when software tries to take control away from me and doesn't notify me of system changes. These are the kinds of things that will keep me far away from Chrome.

      • Re:Scary (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Candid88 (1292486) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @05:11AM (#24856575)

        And if you think google are just using the information "to allow you to customise things and target ads towards you" then you're having a laugh.

        At least government is bound by freedom-of-information acts, elections etc. so we can actually find out about things like RFID tags. There's absolutely no way to tell what Google are up to with the data.

      • You've mixed up Chrome and Chromium (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 03 2008, @07:31AM (#24857385)

        Chrome is Google's private, closed-source browser. Chromium is the open-source (BSD-licensed) project from which Chrome takes some of its code. Chromium is completely non-operational at this point in time (ie. it doesn't run), as it's very early days on the open-source project. Chrome in contrast is very nicely operational already, since its code is not the same as that being put together by the Chromium folks.

        And the key point here is that Chrome and Chromium have completely different licenses, therefore your comment is entirely worthless.

    • Re:404 (Score:5, Funny)

      by MyLongNickName (822545) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @06:13AM (#24856869) Journal

      It blocks Slashdot? It is a bigger success than I thought!

      • The 404 Horses of the Apocalype (Score:5, Funny)

        by DeadDecoy (877617) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @08:04AM (#24857701)
        Yes, they found out slashdot was one of the worst malicious sites out there, as it periodically issued random DDOS attacks to other sites hosting content of scientific import. Once the shlashdot-reading chrome developers discover this, they'll take it off the blacklist (as they too need a daily helping of slashdot) but it'll be layered in warnings and throttled to all-hell. Unfortunately, this will cause paradox leading to the Apocalypse as google will slashdot slashdot just to make the internet work and Chrome function normally. The lucky few will be raptured to Apple, where they will spend the rest eternity amidst pretty, hermetically sealed plastic and user friendly software.

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