Google Drive Terms Of Service Let Google Do Whatever It Likes With Your Files | Hacker News Reader

Google Drive Terms Of Service Let Google Do Whatever It Likes With Your Files

cultofmac.com

33 pointsZeroMinx16 comments

Let's recap the Google TOS story arc:

- Google changed its TOS and everyone got upset about it

- Google made substantial changes to the TOS to clarify that they weren't actually claiming ownership of your IP

- Now, "news" outlets are selectively taking sections out of the new TOS to make it appear bad again

I hate Terms of Service in general. But the criticism leveled by this article has already been addressed. This is incompetent journalism.

I would hardly call "Cult of Mac" journalism. But yes, the other outlets, like CNET, etc are definitely incompetent.

The sections are still there, so it depends on which part is legally binding, the excerpts or the clarifications. Even if Google isn't claiming my IP, they could guarantee that my documents will not be viewable by others except when explicitly permitted. For example, will photos I store on Google Drive appear in image search if they contain some recognizable landmark?

Isn't this a fairly standard "let us serve/host your files from any of our data centers in the world and move them to any data center in the world" EULA with a bit extra so they can build up services around it (translation, OCR, etc.)?

I bet if they swung their critical eye to the EULAs of SkyDrive or DropBox or iCloud they might find something similar.

yes it is. the same was with dropbox tos and others.

It might just be me, but I don't usually trust cultofmac.com with reporting my unbias Google news.

"Google does at least say that these conditions are solely for “the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones,” but as terms of service can change, I’d be a little worried about this claim."

Er, you could say "as terms of service can change, I’d be a little worried" even if the only term in the ToS was "these terms of service can change". If the problem's only a problem if the ToS changes, then it's not a problem yet.

Well, aside from the problem of the whole notion of ToS/EULAs being completely unsuitable for the way they get used nowadays. But that's a whole other issue, and has nothing to do with google.

What about the "publish" part of it ? I mean they can tell me that the code I upload online will stay my intellectual property, and I understand if they need to read it, or modify it for OCR. But why publish ? I don't want my code published everywhere....

As I understand it, sending you any data is considered "publishing" that data, even if it's your intellectual property and you're the only one who's looking at it.

(IANAL)

Ok thank you, But does it also give them the authorization to publish it to anyone else not logged in into my account ?

What if you share files? Or if you make it public? They have to "publish" it to them.

http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/04/24/no-google-does-not-o...

No it doesn't! how many times are we going to go over this!?

It's amazing how FUD spreads like wildfire.

http://www.google.com/policies/terms/

You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.

Read the whole thing, not out of context excerpts.

If Google decides to develop a new service which auctions read access to your files to third parties, wouldn't that be consistent with the terms of service?

No.

They adhere to DMCA takedowns:

We respond to notices of alleged copyright infringement and terminate accounts of repeat infringers according to the process set out in the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The rest is covered by the privacy policy, which states that they don't sell your data to 3rd parties, but as with all cloud services it may be subject to "lawful access": http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/

It's also worth mentioning that Google Apps accounts have different sets of policies.

The linked privacy policy says the same thing about developing new services. It's turtles all the way down.

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