Google Drive Privacy Policies Slammed

Google Drive is here, with all of its extreme low cost storage in the cloud.  If privacy is critical, Google Drive may not be for you.  From the pages of Computerworld:

Privacy advocates have been voicing strong concerns over how data stored on Google Drive may be used during and after customers are actively engaged in using the cloud service.

Hands on with Google Drive

“The terms of service are bad, but even worse is that Google has made clear it will change its terms of service whenever it wishes,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

On March 1, Google “ignored the views of users” and consolidated all of its terms of service, Rotenberg said, so that it could “do more data profiling.”

“After the unilateral changes on March 1, I don’t understand why users would trust Google to stand by its terms of service,” he said.

Rotenberg is not alone in his concerns.

Users commenting in online forums said privacy was the reason they would not use Google Drive.

Users Weigh In

On Dropbox’s online forum a user by name of Chen S. wrote, “My big concern with Google Drive is that they already have all my emails, web analytics, and search terms. Do I really want to give them even more data?”

Another user, Christopher H., said this in the Dropbox forum: “Like many other users, I’m not excited about Google having more data points on my life via the files I will be storing in their cloud.”

Still another Dropbox user, — Mark Mc., noted that while Google might not sell or disclose data without a user’s permission, “they can, however, use that data in anyway shape or form the like internally – and if that includes selling personalised [sic] ad’s based on data farming of the files that I’ve uploaded I’m out of there!”

But a Google spokesman said Drive’s terms of service make it clear, “what belongs to you stays yours” and the company’s policies are no more onerous than other service providers.

“You own your files and control their sharing, plain and simple. Our Terms of Service enable us to give you the services you want — so if you decide to share a document with someone, or open it on a different device, you can,” he said. “Many who have covered this simply ignored that paragraph and quoted only the one immediately following it, which grants us the license required by copyright law to display or transmit content on a user’s behalf. Other companies use very similar language.”

Dropbox’s terms of use says: “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.”

Comparing SkyDrive

Similarly, Microsoft’s SkyDrive terms of use also claim no ownership of user data.

According to Microsoft’s policy, a user controls who may access their content. However, if you share content in public areas of the service or in shared areas available to others you’ve chosen, then you agree that anyone you’ve shared content with may use that content.

“If you don’t want others to have those rights, don’t use the service to share your content,” the policy states. “You understand that Microsoft may need, and you hereby grant Microsoft the right, to use, modify, adapt, reproduce, distribute, and display content posted on the service solely to the extent necessary to provide the service.”

Google’s terms of use say: “You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours. 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 that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.”

Google states in its official blog that its new privacy policy allows it to build a more “intuitive user experience.” For example, if you’re working on Google Docs and you want to share a file with someone on Gmail, “you want their email right there ready to use.”

“Our privacy policies have always allowed us to combine information from different products with your account…. However, we’ve been restricted in our ability to combine your YouTube and Search histories with other information in your account. Our new Privacy Policy gets rid of those inconsistencies so we can make more of your information available to you when using Google,” the company states.

Law and Policy

“I don’t know of any legislation on this subject,” said John Webster, a senior partner with Evaluator Group, a market research firm that specializes in data storage issues. “You have to ask yourself, what’s the business model. If the business model is to make money from a service or money from advertising, that’s one thing. If it’s trying to make money off the sale of data, that’s another thing.”

While older Internet users tend to be wary of how their data is used and protected, younger users rarely consider the consequences of where they store personal information, Webster said. “They may not be reading the fine print.”

The other issue to consider is what happens to your data when you leave a cloud service behind, he said.

Google’s terms also state that when a user discontinues use of its service, it continues to retain the right to use customer information.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas’s RSS feed. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

Google Drive Launch Scheduled For Early April

The Scan Man got one right!  Yes, Google Drive is Coming.  The G-Drive will have some stiff competition from established players like Dropbox.  Read on from the pages of Geeksailor:

After an endless string of rumors and speculations, Google seems finally ready to launch GDrive, the storage in the cloud service of the search engine giant.

Google Drive, the storage in the cloud service developed by Google, could become available in April. Google Drive’s launch date was not officially unveiled, but the rumors come from a trusted source, inside Google.

It’s true, the first rumors about Google Drive surfaced about five years ago, and almost each year since, it was speculated that Google is “finally” launching their cloud storage service.

As about the storage in the cloud capacity, rumor has it that Google Drive will offer only 1 GB of free storage, while they will charge for 10 GB, 20 GB or 50 GB of storage in the cloud.

Meanwhile, Apple and Microsoft have launched iCloud and SkyDrive, respectively, and besides the two IT giants there are tons of small companies and developers that offer this type of services. I am sure that names like DropBox or Box.net are familiar to you.

Google will finally launch a cloud storage service, besides GoogleDocs, and it seems that GDrive is ready for launch in the first week of April, according to sources quoted by GigaOM.

Sources say that Google’s cloud storage service will offer only 1 GB of free storage, which might turnagainst Google, given that Dropbox offers 2 GB of free storage. GDrive will use an user interface similar to the one of GoogleDocs, also available on web via a local application.

First rumors about Google’s cloud service appeared in 2006, but the American company have made the first step in this direction in 2010, when they allowed their users to upload their documents in Google Docs.

April is just around the corner, thus, if the GDrive rumors are true, we would be able to use Google’s storage in the cloud service pretty soon. We promise to keep you updated on the matter, so stay tuned.

New Format Adds Computing Power to Documents

From the pages of Technology Review published by MIT:  Publishing information in the new CDF format allows readers to interact with your data.

Turning static documents into interactive presentations, so that a reader can manipulate charts and use demo programs in the middle of a page, is nothing new. But a new document format created by Wolfram Research, the people behind knowledge search engineWolfram Alpha, claims to overcome the limits of other formats such as PDF, Flash, and those of Microsoft Office.

Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research, hopes his Computable Document Format, or CDF, will become an established publishing standard adopted by the makers of document editing and viewing software. In a series of interactive demos and videos, Wolfram Research claims CDF documents beat existing formats at interactivity and flexibility, yet don’t require a programmer to create. It includes some of the capabilities of Mathematica, the mathematical software package sold by Wolfram Research to scientists and engineers.

Wolfram’s challenge will be to gain adoption of his format in the more business-minded makers of publishing tools. Currently, CDF authoring tools allow users to import data from Word and Excel documents, but the format won’t be a winner until it allows them to publish new documents in popular formats. A spokeswoman for Adobe declined to comment on whether that company is considering CDF support for its popular PDF format used for Web publishing.

Wolfram Research told CNET that they are still working on a business model to make money from CDF. Looking at the example documents on Wolfram’s site (you’ll need to install a free CDF player on your computer), it’s believable that CDF was driven by an honest frustration with the limits of current technology rather than a master plan to get rich. If you’ve ever viewed a report with charts prepared by someone else, you may know the feeling: What hidden trends or complete surprises might be uncovered if you could manipulate the author’s data yourself?