Privacy Advocates Slam Google Drive's Privacy Policies 219
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."'
Fluff piece (Score:4, Interesting)
What a fluff piece from the Verge. It doesn't compare the exact wording of the policies. Instead, it justifies Google's policy by saying abuse is "unlikely" (which isn't the point) and explains that rival services need certain delivery permissions to run the service, but it doesn't cite any examples from the policies of those rivals that are equivalent to the content license that Google Drive grants.
The article also claims that "public" refers to the user and their actions regarding their own data. But that is NOT what Google Drive's policy states--it explicitly states that the content is licensed to Google as well as anyone Google works with.
Re:Google's motivation (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, you're right, that is not a new concept. Servers get hacked all the time. Stolen data is in the headlines every day.
The new concept that everyone is bitching about is the legal "theft" of your data, which is outlined on page 3,742 in the hardcopy version of the EULA. I found a copy once, in one of Google's old abandoned data centers. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'
That's the issue. Trusting a cloud provider. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if I uploaded a truecrypt volume that was absolutely unreadable to anyone but me if I started getting targeted ads for TrueCrypt...
I'm just trying to figure out how people rationalized the first problem, the fact that no online solution is 100% secure, if they're taking offense to the new one, the "lack of trust".
What Google does with the data is immaterial if the data is sensitive enough to have a privacy concern in the first place. If you don't want people seeing it, you should not put it on the internet. Period. If you're willing to take the risk of putting your super duper secret formula on the internet in the first place, why would Google scraping it to target ads be what concerns you? I would think that the possibility of it being seen by anyone (which is always a possibility, as long as human beings are involved any step of the way) would have been enough of a motivating factor to not put the super duper secret formula on the internet in the first place.
I don't know, maybe it's just easier for me to be objective because I have no real need for a cloud storage solution and use them simply as a convenience, but I would think that any enterprise that had information sensitive enough to warrant these privacy concerns wouldn't be going to a third party to host their data in the first place. Coca-Cola isn't going to ask Google to store a copy of their secret recipe [wikipedia.org], and if they did, the last thing they should be worried about is a bot scraping it to target ads. That's why all this privacy hysteria cracks me up as concerns cloud storage, because it requires the user to have already decided that the base insecurity inherent in any network attached computer (any computer at all, really) wasn't enough of a concern to make them stay away in the first place. If you care about your data's privacy, for fuck's sake, keep it off the internet, and damn sure don't trust a third party like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc, to keep an eye on it. That's just retarded.
Re:Of COURSE they require that license (Score:4, Interesting)
If Google does not require that license to your content, then how in gods name will they do simple things like display thumbnail previews of documents, which by NECESSITY is a derrivitive work? If anything, the fact that Microsoft and Dropbox *does not* have this in their agreement basically means they are violating their agreement constantly, just no one is calling them on it.
No. Thumbnails are not copyright infringement. [publicknowledge.org] That's been litigated and won. By Google. So they know better.