You retain full ownership to your stuff. 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.
To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. All web services should be subject to harsh scrutiny of their privacy policies, but a close and careful reading reveals that Google's terms are pretty much the same as anyone else's, and slightly better in some cases. If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. The Google Drive cloud storage service launched yesterday to much fanfare, but as with any new Google product, there are important questions about how the company will actually use personal data uploaded to the system.
Google sells ads against your data, after all, and the more data you give the company, the more opportunity it has to screw up. That means the Google Drive terms of service and privacy policy are critically important, and there's been a lot of selective interpretation floating around the web in the past 24 hours — and a lot of comparisons to the privacy policies of competitive services like Dropbox and Microsoft's SkyDrive.
That's great — all web services should be subject to harsh scrutiny of their privacy policies — but a close and careful reading reveals that Google's terms are pretty much the same as anyone else's, and slightly better in some cases.
Let's take a look. Google's biggest problem with the Google Drive privacy policy is that there isn't actually a specific Google Drive privacy policy — there's just Google's new unified terms of service and privacy policy. The move to combine and simplify the company's various service-specific terms into comprehensive documents earlier this year met with a great deal of criticism and even international scrutiny , but Google seems determined to maintain just one set of documents for users.
That means the company has to use fairly expansive language to cover all the bases, and it can be a little off-putting. Here's the section from Google's terms of service that's causing all the controversy today, with my emphasis in bold:. 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 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 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. That's a lot of rights to give Google, on the face of it — in fact, it's basically every right you can give to Google as a copyright holder.
But think about how limited Google's services would be if it didn't have permission to use, host, store, modify, communicate, publish, or distribute your content — it couldn't move files around on its servers, cache your data, or make image thumbnails, since those would be unauthorized copies. It would be illegal to play YouTube clips in public. In short, Google is giving itself all the permissions it could possibly need to run all of Google services, with the specific limitations that it doesn't own anything you upload and it can't use your data beyond running its services.
But what about that line about granting rights for "promoting and improving our Services," you ask? Can Google sniff around individual users Drive folders and use their images as the background on google.
Well, no. Not only would that be insane corporate suicide, but that sort of behavior is forbidden by the Google privacy policy , which says:. We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users.
We also use this information to offer you tailored content - like giving you more relevant search results and ads. Again, it's expansive language, but it's clear that Google's after the ability to run its services and sell targeted ads, not dig around in your Drive folders. It would be a lot simpler for Google to offer a custom Drive-specific terms of service and privacy policy that set all of this out more directly, but as long as the company insists on having just one set of documents, this sort of expansive-but-limited language is what we're left with.
ZDNet's Ed Bott has more. The chances are Google's terms will never be an issue -- and it is likely over-zealous lawyers making sure Google doesn't somehow get screwed in the long run by a lawsuit -- but it may be enough to push away a great number of entrepreneurs and creative workers who rely on holding on to the rights to their own work.
I asked Google to see if they can shed light on how its terms of service translates in comparison to other, rival services. Google did not respond at the time of publication. Updated on April 24 and again on April 26 to match changes made to the original story, posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines under the headline " How far do Google Drive's terms go in 'owning' your files?
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Who owns your files on Google Drive? The Google Terms of Service give Google a limited purpose license to operate and improve the Google Drive services — so if you decide to share a document with someone, or want to open it on a different device, we can provide that functionality. Google Drive also allows you to collaborate on the content of other Google Drive users. Sharing settings in Google Drive allow you to control what others can do with your content in Google Drive.
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