Google does not want rights to things you do using Chrome (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Google does not want rights to things you do using Chrome (2008)

mattcutts.com

162 pointsgigaArpit84 comments

This sort of agreement keeps on popping up. Again and again.

The most forgiving reading of the intent of this sort of agreement is that "it is the basic function of a web browser to transfer your stuff across the internet, and it is the basic function of a website to do stuff like make thumbnails of your images and send them to people looking at your stuff, and you are cool with us doing this" but it always ends up being written in the most incredibly grabby way possible, demanding a perpetual, irrevocable license for all potential future uses so that you can't sue if one thumbnail gets forgotten when you delete your stuff or because it got turned into a new format or something.

And this kind of license just happens to cover other stuff nobody thought of at the time like "we can totally train an AI on everything you generate and let people ask it to generate work explicitly derivative of your work without owing you a single cent". Which is a total dick move. So's stuff like "track everything you do and share that data with a distributed surveillance industry that sprung up around advertising". And eventually some asshole comes along and says "hey I could make a lot of money doing this thing that everyone "agreed" to when they scrolled down that lengthy terms of service and hit OK".

I worked at deviantArt back in the early 2010s, they notably had a user agreement that did not claim any rights more than necessary, and it was revocable by the user without jumping through hoops. So it's not necessary to do things this way, companies do it intentionally because they don't care about the rights of their users.

The corollary to this is that companies do this because they are incentivised to do so by their very fundamental goal - to make profit. Whatever pressure that does not lead to a loss on the quarterly report is, in practice, no pressure at all. If we truly want these predatory practices to stop, we have to start promoting different incentives, different priorities, and by 'we' I really mean 'each and every one of us collectively'.

I don't think there's any point saying this without suggesting how to do it. "We should betterify things" is not worth saying.

I am building a company that accepts user generated data, and one surprising struggle is getting my lawyers to stop writing shitty, overbroad, abusive TOS. They are just so used to it, and all the templates and boiler plate is designed to give me everything and the user nothing. And if I want to do better by ny users I have to fight and cajole my own lawyers and pay extra for them to do the extra work of writing terms that aren’t predatory because that is unusual and custom.

It sucks.

Wishing you luck, you are doing some good work putting in the effort to respect the data of the user, something which stands out in a seas full of companies who do not care.

> It sucks.

It depends on your perspective surely? As a lawyer your job is typically to protect your client from legal risk, so if users are happy to sign a really expansive set of terms (which experience shows is the case) that gives grants lots of permission to do stuff with their data then that's low risk. If you as a business don't want that then you need to make it explicit that you're willing to take on some extra risk.

Also by using “standard boilerplate” they are using language with meanings well established by precedent. Craft your own version in “regular English” and it’s much more open to litigation.

But didn't DeviantArt ultimately decide to opt-in every work hosted on the platform to train its generative AI?

Eventually they sold out. Literally and figuratively.

I definitely recall uproars over DA doing this exact same kind of overreach in their TOS! Possibly before you were around, doing the math on my user page there saying "deviant for 22y" tells me I opened my account there in 2003.

This just seems like the right approach. It's never going to be safe to claim the rights to user uploaded content without verifying they hold the rights to it in the first place.

Companies do it because lawsuits are "explosive", if the Chrome team fucks up, they can bring down not only Chrome, but potentially the entirety of Google itself.

Deviant Art's only product is Deviant art, so the upside in goodwill from a user-friendly agreement might be greater than the downside of some remote possiblity of a lawsuit. This isn't true about Google, which has many other products and revenue streams.

Mozilla doesn't need a "license" to everything you transmit over the internet in order for Firefox to facilitate transmitting it over the internet. In fact, Mozilla should never be able to touch things I transmit over the internet using Firefox. They only need a "license" if they are planning on wiretapping me and they want it to be legal.

IANAL but at least in some EU countries you can't give away all rights preemptively for usecases not yet known at the time. So a blanket giveaway doesn't necessarily include AI training (it is a different question if the people performing that act actually care).

It's important to remember that no matter what they write in the agreement, they can will still be sued, and they can and may still be found at fault. So the utility of edge case disclaimers are questionable at best, and indicate 'evil' intent at worst.

america’s litigation problem is really not about google specifically , rather a broad cultural issue. Perhaps the internet age has outgrown industrial age laws, or maybe america just sucks (Grandma saw segregation, suppression of woman’s suffrage, use of nuclear weapons vs Japan), or maybe maximizing self interest is fundamental to nature.

One takeaway of the Mozilla debacle is that software as a non-service is dying if not dead.

What I mean is the concept that software could be a thing that someone just obtains, like a pencil. The things you write with a pencil belong to you. The pencil belongs to you. You don't have an ongoing contractual licensing agreement with the pencil manufacturer that gives them a worldwide non-commercial right to reflect light off the graphite in order to display words.

In 2008, Google had already begun to forget that software could be like a pencil. It seems that in 2025, even the concept is alien to lawyers and perhaps developers at Mozilla, and many other places. The do not understand how one could use a software tool without granting the company behind it a license to everything you do with the tool, because they do not understand the concept of software usage except as a business relationship between the user and the company who developed it.

If AI makes the cost of development low enough then some individuals or small teams will still sell software like a pencil

Oh they understand the concept. Its just that the recurring revenue and data are more important and without competition or alternatives then why not take everything you can take from the user. What are they going to do? Stop using the internet?

What are they going to do? Stop using the internet?

Stop using newer versions of the software. Firefox is open-source, so forking and fixing the older versions before these hostile changes is not impossible.

I hope this is true. I don't know how to maintain a web browser, hopefully those that do are willing to do the work to keep it running.

Does a web browser need maintenance beyond security fixes?

They can either spend their efforts at trying to catch up with Google and their constant anticompetitive churn, or propaganda (for lack of a better term) against web developers trendchasing that churn.

I mean, security fixes are still maintenance on their own, and on an attack surface as wide as “the entire Internet”, it’s a non-trivial one.

But also… what people want to do on their devices evolves. Web developers want to be able to support that. So they rely on browser developers to constantly support new features. One can bemoan this state of the world as much as they’d like(*), but at a certain point it’s just sticking one’s head in the sand.

(*) I style myself mostly a native platforms developer, and I’d love it if the web wasn’t the de-facto cross-platform architecture of choice. But alas.

I tried viewing Notion and self-hosted Mattermost using SeaMonkey last week. Nothing was displayed at all. Trac pages still worked though. So yeah, a web browser needs more than security fixes.

I wonder how much of that is user agent related?

Start blaming the sites for using new Chrome(ium)-exclusive features when they're not otherwise necessary. The fact that many sites which decide to update and then offer zero or often negative value to the user, while requiring a newer browser, should be proof that Google is doing an embrace-extend-extinguish on web standards, and web developers who get sucked into their propaganda are making it harder for alternative browsers.

There are new web features being adopted by browsers other than Chrome all the time.

They're essentially being forced to by Google.

They may be adopted by browsers other than Chrome, but were they invented by other browsers?

To display increasingly prevalent chrome-only web apps, they need new features. Static html style websites should work with old browsers.

I feel like Apple is to some extent the last bastion of this idea, at least as far as big tech companies go. (You could probably lump HP and Dell in there too, but to a lesser extent in my opinion).

Since they produce hardware, they have are in a fairly unique place to push on device computing. Since their products are expensive, they don’t need to chase down every bit of extra “as a service” revenue at the long term expense of the product.

Oh please

Apple is extremely user-hostile, going to great lengths to strip users of control of their devices, gaslighting them into staying in the walled garden (with great success), while simultaneously siphoning as much user data as it can get away with, and employing as many dark patterns as it can to prevent the users from exercising their rights (it's worse than Meta in this regard).

Truly, Apple always amazes me with its ability to put expensive rose tinted glasses on its users's noses.

People want the service-y features, though. Immediately getting access to all your passwords, bookmarks, history, and extensions when you log in is a major selling point of both Firefox and Chrome, and people want features like that more than they want local-only software that’s fully under their control.

Looks like this article might need a new "Updated" entry because current chrome ToS points to generic : https://policies.google.com/terms

To keep things simple (for them) they get rights to everything :(

important fact missing in the article (maybe even from title): matt never spoke for google and didn't work at google since the mid 2010s i think.

he's an early hire who became a star Obama-era DOGEdepto-esque (mostly for good) technocrat, which then caused most of his peers to be hired left and right in hopes to get access to that cadre.

The article is from 2008...

was posted now without the date

Mozilla is sooo fucked here. On one hand, it would take them approx ~1 sentence of blog to say "We won't sell your input info to anyone" and this drama goes away.

OTOH: if the currently pending court case on anti-monopoly bars google from making payments to mozilla (which is about ~90%++ of their revenue), mozilla truly, and well is fucked. Meaning -they need to diversify, and they know it; they can't sell browsers, related services are heavily competed for, so ads & selling user data is broadly the only viable strat that can underwrite their existence.

Of course, the community won't have it. And therein lies the rub: by going with google's bribe, on this long term, they wrote themselves into a corner they can't exit.

They've had a decade and a half now to invest and diversify. I've been incredibly disappointed in every attempt.

Honestly, just investing the good portion of the revenue from Google in an index fund and treating it like an endowment would probably have done better than they ended up.

100% agree. there have been posts here investigating Mozilla's budget - they have clearly squandered the money they received from Google.

> On one hand, it would take them approx ~1 sentence of blog to say "We won't sell your input info to anyone" and this drama goes away.

I wouldn't count on it.

A pinky promise isn't legally binding, but the contract terms are. Too many companies have screwed over their customers in the past. It's 2025, nobody is going to trust any "promise" a company makes. If you give them a finger, it's all but guaranteed they are going to try taking your hand.

They could've just bagged Google's money and spend only as much as necessary on the browser and kept the rest for the future. If Google won't be allowed to pay them for Google Search anymore they'd still have enough money to maintain Firefox for another decade+. Mozilla trying to diversify with services nobody wants is the root of the issue, not the remedy.

In case anyone didn't know, Matt (the blog author) was the head of Webspam at the time, and a Distinguished Engineer at Google (and semi-official spokesperson for Google web spam issues). He left Google eight years after writing this, and went to the USDS for a few years, and then retired I believe.

Would be curious what Matt thinks of today's Google.

I've always felt that when he stepped back at Google was when things took a turn for the worse.

Correlation does not necessarily equal causation, though.

Yeah, but correlation was the point here, irrespective of causation

Matt Cutts was one of the Google search OGs.

The kind of cultural values (e.g. make user happy all else will follow) he and a number of other original Google employees believed in and tried to defend have loooong been overridden by the Sundars and other Prabakhars who only kowtowed to the short-term demands of wall street.

Cutts, Ben Gomes and similar-minded do-gooders have all neatly been benched a long time ago.

Yeah when I was there (2011-2021) you could just see the positioning from "slightly hypocritical, probably naive, but overall in favour of the user and classic 1990s Internet principles" to... what it is now... shifting in a slow inevitable and painful wave. The last 5 years I was there especially.

He also went on to serve as the second administrator for the United States Digital Service, which has just recently been hijacked and gutted by DOGE. Sadly it’s not just the cultural values of Google that have shifted since then.

The Google founders were never out there to do any good. They started hijacking web content, with the excuse that it was a scientific project in Stanford, then right away converted that into a for profit corporation (similar to what OpenAI did). Next they planned to do the same with books, before they were stoped by a tsunami of lawsuits.

they aspire to "don't be evil" which isn't exactly the same as "do be good"

...but still helps people on HN occasionally! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42918310

I'm sorry, but please stop pretending that a company which came about thanks to a DARPA grant and then received seed funding from the investment company used by the US intelligence agencies to fund projects they like, had noble intentions at any point in time.

"Prabakhars"?

> Prabakhars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhakar_Raghavan

also:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

And you are correct, there's just one. The additional 's' was meant to mean "and others very much like him".

bean counters like Prabakhar Raghavan

Interesting how things have changed in the past 17 years! Google of today, would rather own one's thoughts if they could, let alone things we write in their address bar.

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971

Per “Breakfast with Hunter” that’s his favorite piece of writing of his career. Great citation.

It’s interesting how this quote can apply to so many different things throughout history.

I know it specifically references the 1960’s San Francisco counter culture but it’s a poignant quote because it can apply beyond that too.

One day they’ll write the things into the address bar for us :)

"I'm feeling lucky" but brain-implant edition :))

"My feelings are exclusively dictated by advertisers!"

That’s basically the goal of the last decade of changes to Google search culminating in AI summaries: give you the information they think you want on the results page to stop you from leaving for another url.

In my mind it’s more like they give you what they want you to accept in these results and the AI summaries. It really seems like the days where any of these giant corps gave you what you actually wanted are long past.

> would rather own one's thoughts if they could

This is actually probably coming at some point in the not so distant future:

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/13/229-...

> In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product.

Ok, so what other Google products do want rights to the things I do?

Smells fishy, to say the least.

Any reason why this is on the front page today? Is there some context for why this is interesting now?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612

Firefox. [1]

Note that Google does want the rights to things you do using Chrome now, too.

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&query=firefox

Because it's very contradictory to Google's current stance (we can do whatever we want with your data)

> In order to keep things simple for our users

This isn't simple, of course, hence the confusion that prompted you to reach out to legal and publish a dismissive clarification

There was always content in users’ click paths / search trails.

Google has mined that for profit from the beginning. Cutts and Co turned a blind eye here.

It was ALL OK though - because Google’s mission was DONT BE EVIL!

In 2008 Google was besieged by SEO consultants spamming their index.

Mining the collective intelligence of the hooman’s search trails was their algorithmic escape clause.

Their escape clause in 2025?

Mine for MORE!

They absolutely do want all the rights, they just got caught and have changed it "for now". They're modeling it after the music cartels.

Can you say Mozilla?

Shoot 'em all in the back!

Is this still the case?

No, the generic Google ToS (https://policies.google.com/terms) now apply universally and grant this kind of access.

if I use a pencil, I don't need to sign an absurd grant giving the company that made the pencil worldwide royalty free rights to use anything I create using it

the legal entity that made the pencil is not involved in this process, and does not need to be

correspondingly, Mozilla, the legal entity is not involved when I use their tool to submit a form on a third party website

so there is some other motive for suddenly requiring this

my bet: ads, tracking, and selling my output to the AI slop generating companies

(IANAL)

This is the company that reads your emails.

Great find. Yes, things are different now. So too for SaaS.

>2008

Back when google wasn’t evil, did cool shit, and had a functional search engine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com