Will Google Drive snoop inside your Data?

[garyopa]

According to Google’s service terms... they can!



An interesting article by TIME, reveals that Google could theoretically pore over your G-Drive data at leisure!!

According to an article by TIME Techland, Google could theoretically snoop inside your data stored in Google Drive, as indicated within the company service terms. Apparently, they could use your info for a relentless pursuit of more personalized ads!

When Google simplified its “terms of service” last month, it did so in part by pulling all of its separate privacy policies under one umbrella, consolidating text and admirably rewriting things in a way that sounds at least a little less like mind-numbing, cover-every-base legalese.

In its “terms of service,” Google states that “Some of our Services allow you to submit content,” Google Drive (nee Google Docs) being the most obvious one. Google rightly acknowledges that “You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.” Rest easy, in other words, Google’s not looking to co-opt your intellectual property.

The next part is the unsettling one:

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

“The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones,” states Google, but since “advertising” — Google’s bread and butter — works as a catchall under any of those, it means the company could, in theory, poke around in any of your content or pass information about that content along to third parties under the auspices of self-perpetuation.

According to TIME, Google needs to be clearer, just like Dropbox:

Google’s not alone in needing clearer, more restrained terms of use for cloud-drive content. Contrast its terms with Dropbox’s, where the latter states:

"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".

Well, there you go. Check out the full article below, which is pretty interesting. And you are now warned, so you should be extra careful on what you store in there!

NEWS SOURCE: http://techland.time.com/2012/04/26/...to-be-clearer/

Our thanks to 'Gauss' for this news story!

[Xenogears V]

I alwasy thought they did this.

[wewii]

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

... and releasing any data to any Government / Police / Military / Spy / Contract agency without a warrant or additional consent.


Stay away from all cloud services. They are all BS.

External Harddrive FTW.