Google Drive does *not* own your data!
- @pdparticle - WOW! Google pretty much owns your data once uploaded to Google Drive. t.co/YUIqIVtM #GoogleDrive
- Google Drive owns everything you upload: terms of service analysis t.co/MDuZZ52R
First of all, just to get this out of the way, Google explicitly says
Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yoursMoving on, consider what rights Google needs to just do what it does on a day to day basis
In fact, do this backwards - if you store your data on a hosted service, anywhere, then you have to assign a whole bushel of rights to that service for them to do anything.
Seriously.
- They need to make a thumbnail of this image
- They need to back it up
- They need to index it
- They need to copy it to other servers for both caching purposes, as well as retrieval efficiency
The bottom line is that if you are using pretty much any online service (and I include Dropbox, Box, whatever) and you didn't assign them a whole passel of rights, they are almost certainly violating copyright law. In fact, the odds are that if you parse their TOS pretty carefully, you'll find that you actually did assign them pretty much the same rights that you've assigned Google :-)
To just use Dropbox as an example, their TOS says (emphasis mine)
In short, you just agreed to give them any and all rights that they need to run the Services. Thats a pretty broad transfer, no? Mind you, I'm not saying this is evil - I'm just pointing out that for a service to even function, copyright law mandates that you give 'em a whole bunch-a rights. Furthermore, this is a pretty open-ended statement, since they never actually come out and say what they need to run the Services - just a bunch of examples. It could, in fact, be anything they want, as long as it is associated with "running their services"By using our Services you provide us with information, files, and folders that you submit to Dropbox (together, “your stuff”). You retain full ownership to your stuff. We don’t claim any ownership to any of it. These Terms do not grant us any rights to your stuff or intellectual property except for the limited rights that are needed to run the Services, as explained below.We may need your permission to do things you ask us to do with your stuff, for example, hosting your files, or sharing them at your direction. This includes product features visible to you, for example, image thumbnails or document previews. It also includes design choices we make to technically administer our Services, for example, how we redundantly backup data to keep it safe. You give us the permissions we need to do those things solely to provide the Services. This permission also extends to trusted third parties we work with to provide the Services, for example Amazon, which provides our storage space (again, only to provide the Services)
In fact, in this regard, Google is actually slightly better, since their privacy policy comes right out and says
We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.In short, its actually close-ended (as compared to Dropbox), i.e., anything that isn't listed in the Privacy Policy is verboten.
The bottom line?
Don't panic.
Google isn't being evil - they're just doing what copyright law requires them to do...
Note: I am not a lawyer...
Comments
Just because we upload a file of our own to one of these services doesn't mean that they need to own all these copyrights on our content. They are the medium for our content, they do not need they copyrights too!
Just like the post office delivers your mail without owning it. Just like email servers send your emails without asking for copyrights. Just like a music band keeps the copyright to their music but let the music companies distribute it.
To repeat the point I made in the article, just for their regular business purposes Google (and Dropbox, Box, SugarSync, etc.) need to shuffle the bits around, make thumbnails, index the data, back it up, etc. Virtually *all* of these qualify as "format changes" of the original content, and consequently require some level of rights transfer...
That said, it's true that Google doesn't *own* your data. They just claim broader rights to it than they should. Some will notice and balk. Most will blithely acquiesce, and their work represented in what they store will become part of Google's product.