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Comment by Xuzz | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, this post from The Verge explains what is actually going on: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2973849/google-drive-terms...

The important quote: "Looking at some of Google's competitors, it's clear that they need the exact same permissions — they just use slightly more artful language to communicate them."

All of these services need similar permissions, as do most web services: it's just an artifact of how our copyright law works. Google does a bad job of expressing that reality as nicely as others (like Dropbox), but with almost equivalent permissions, I'd put them pretty far down on the list of companies not to trust.

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Excellent article. I particularly liked this observation regarding verbiage in the Dropbox TOS: "That language is definitely friendlier than Google's, but it's actually more expansive, since it's more vague."

As laypersons, we may feel more comfortable when companies avoid legalese and use straight talk, but that doesn't mean we are any more safer or protected.

The article posted here on HN cheats by including an important sentence from the DropBox TOS and sneakily omitting the corresponding sentence from the Google TOS.

DropBox: You give us the permissions we need to do those things solely to provide the Services.

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

Those sentences do not say the same thing. Most worrying: "promoting" in the Google terms.

"solely" is a pretty important word in "solely to provide the Services".

Google's is worse because it takes all rights to use your work however it likes, and then states in its privacy policy that it won't use it for anything other than to provide the service. But if it likes, it can amend the privacy policy in the future to remove or modify that limitation. So you have to trust Google, which may be fine now, but what about in 20 years? They have rights to your work forever.

Other providers clearly state that they are only taking rights to your work for the purpose of providing the service, right in the ToS. IANAL, but this seems important.

I'm confused. You say Google "states in its privacy policy that it won't use it for anything other than to provide the service", but that's not good enough, because they can amend it later to remove that protection.

How is that different from the other providers, who (as you said, again) "clearly state that they are only taking rights to your work for the purpose of providing the service"? What is different about them which stops them from amending their policies?

> I'm confused.

No, you're not. You identified a crystal clear double standard in your parent post.

>Google's is worse because it takes all rights to use your work however it likes, and then states in its Privacy Ppolicy that it won't use it for anything other than to provide the service.

Please point to the part of the Privacy Policy that deal with "my works" or "works that I create and own". I think if you look closely, the PP only deal with information Google collects about your usage of the service, which is quite different to works you upload to Drive.

The Verge article is very good at explaining the actual details. However, although IANAL, I think they missed on one part of their explanation:

They say: But what about that line about granting rights for "promoting and improving our Services," you ask? ... and then conclude that sort of behavior is forbidden by the Google privacy policy

but part of the Privacy Policy they quote also says: We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones,...

So it would seem to me that legally that's still a fairly wide scope for what they could potentially do under the umbrella of improving existing and developing new services.

The article highlights a different part of the Privacy Policy: We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy. ... but given the previous clause, there seems to be a pretty big umbrella of things that _are_ set out in the Privacy Policy.

I'd put them pretty far down on the list of companies not to trust.

I think this is the bottom line in both The Verge article and your comment - whether you trust the company is ultimately more important than the details of the ToS.

How do you trust a company? Many trusted Sun with Java, and we see what that got us.

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