test.ical.ly | getting the web by the balls

Apr/12

27

Google – All your data are belong to us!

2 Comments · Posted by Christian in Outside the box

Yesterday on my post about Google Drive someone called Mika commented about the terms of use for Google products. It appears that whatever you upload to their services effectively belongs to them.

This kind of sounds familiar.

In a nutshell by agreeing to their terms you give Google all the right to do anything with your uploaded contents. Reading them, changing them, repackaging them, redistributing them even selling them. Forever and ever even if you stopped using their services.

But you don’t loose all the content. It’s still yours in that you are still responsible for it. If you didn’t own the rights to upload it in the first place it’s you being legally responsible. If it conflicts with any law.. guess what.

Basically you provide content and in return you will get to use the Google services while Google can go on turning your content into money.

Or: Creative people create content giving it away for some small benefit to some big corporation that turns their contents into big money.

Sounds familiar?

That’s more or less how the publishing industry as well as the music industry works.

Or shall I say worked as it seems that platform providers such as Google start cutting out the middle man?

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  • http://dandydev.net Daan

    You sir, are actually wrong, with all due respect :) If you read the Google Drive TOS carefully, you’ll notice that the only reason they request so much access to your data, is to actually be able to _provide_ and facilitate their services. They specifically mention you keep complete ownership over your data, and they also mention that they’ll use all those permissions you grant them, solely for the use of providing you the requested services.
    Think about it, if Google would not be permitted to reproduce your data or alter it, they would never be able to store it on their servers, move it to a different server or to encrypt it for your own safety.

    People are seeing evil where there is none.
    For more information, see this article: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2973849/google-drive-terms-privacy-data-skydrive-dropbox-icloud

  • http://test.ical.ly Christian

    @Daan I’m not actualy looking for evil being and I can completely see the (well meant) reasoning behind the ToC.
    But ownership translates to being responsible while providing translates to distribution.

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