How Google Drive’s privacy policy stacks up against its rivals

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 Drive 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 criticismand 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 servicethat'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 cangive 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 couldn't run Google Translate or Google Image Search. 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.com? 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. [...] We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy. 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. Update: Google just sent us the following statement to clarify its terms of service: As our Terms of Service make clear, "what belongs to you stays yours." 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. Looking at some of Google's competitors, it's clear that they need the exact same permissions — they just use slightly more artful language to communicate them. Dropbox Dropbox's terms of serviceand privacy policy are much friendlier than Google's, and they only cover one product — Dropbox. That means they can be slightly more tailored to the service itself. Here's the relevant portion, again with my emphasis in bold: 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.