There is a huge amount of traffic on Google’s new Google drive cloud storage system. There are predictions from “they will kill Drop Box and Sky Drive” to it will fail. So this is pretty much your average launch of a new Google product. One of the things that has made the rounds yesterday we were not surprised by (and frankly are shocked that other media outlets are surprised by this), this is the terms of service that seem to indicate that anything you put on Google drive belongs to Google.We are very confused at why these terms of service are so shocking (maybe there was not much to write about). Google has been claiming this for a very long time and if you check the terms of service for Gmail, Google Docs and even Chrome you will find that they have this in there. Going all the way back to the launch of Google Chrome we saw them relate the idea that any pictures or data you posted while using Chrome belonged to Google due to their caching function. In fact the original terms and conditions gave Google a “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute”
Wow kind of extensive for the use of a web browser don’t you think? What occurred to many at the time (and it will occur again) is that Google takes the same TOC and uses it over and over again with little or no changes until someone cries foul.
We will certainly see Google revise their terms of use here as they do not own the files that are submitted (that would violate many privacy and copyright laws), but they want you to know that they can do anything they want to those files. It also protects them from potential litigation if one of their employees should do something malicious with your data (despite Google claiming otherwise they can get into your storage, email and doc accounts).
On the other hand Google, like Facebook, would love to own the rights to all of your data. There is so much they could do if they have slipped in a clause about owning the rights to anything stored on their services. Imagine being able to use pictures for ads, text in documents etc. If you think this is outrageous, just remember that Facebook actually allowed ad partners to use user images in their targeted ads without asking for user permission! So this is not so outrageous any longer.
The craze over Google Drive will fade soon as what is going on becomes mundane (after all there are plenty of cloud based storage even Asus has their own). For now, it is kind of fun to see all of the different opinions and to once again see Google try and slip in the right to all of your data into another set of terms of service… and of course get caught all over again.
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