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We sometimes need your permission to do what you ask us to do with your stuff (for example, hosting, making public, or sharing your files). The text of the terms of service is listed below. Dropbox recently changed their terms of service so that they have the legal right to modify and distribute your data and while some maintain that it’s only for use within the system, the terms are similar to Google’s and seem to imply that it can be used for marketing purposes, amongst other things. There are several competing products on the market, all that do similar tasks: Allow you to access your files from any Internet-enabled device.
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You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law.
CRASHPLAN VS SPIDEROAK LICENSE
Although Amazon does not give themselves an irrevocable license nor do they give themselves the ability to use your files royalty-free, they still have the ability to “access, retain, use, and disclose your files.” The upside is that, compared to Google, it doesn’t appear to give them permission to use your files in an advertising campaign.ĥ.2 Our Right to Access Your Files. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.ġ1.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.Īmazon’s Cloud Drive seems a bit more consumer-friendly compared to Google’s offering, but it still has some worrying terminology. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. In addition the agreement seems vague in that access to your data can be used to “promote the Services,” implying that an image you upload to Google Docs could potentially be used royalty-free for their next advertising blitz.ġ1.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. Even more frightening is the word “irrevocable.” While I’m no lawyer, only Google and Syncplicity used that language in their terms of service and it seems to imply that once you post data to the service, you can never take away their rights to do with it as they will.
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Google, the company that prides itself in “doing no evil” has a terms of service very similar to that of Dropbox, but actually takes things one step further by granting access to your data to third party companies that do business with Google. Amazon is mainly focusing on music delivery, whereas Google Docs allows users to read/write/edit documents from any Internet capable machine. While both services are similar, there are some notable differences.
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For the sake of our analysis, we looked at Google Docs and Amazon’s Cloud Drive. Amazon Cloud DriveĬloud based storage has been around for awhile and one could argue that anything stored on the Internet falls into this category. We ended by looking at two popular backup solutions, Mozy and Crashplan.Ĭloud Storage: Google Docs vs. We looked at Dropbox and a couple of its competitors, Syncplicity and Spideroak. We looked at a couple of cloud services, namely Google Docs and Amazon Cloud Drive. We decided to examine a few different services to get an idea of how they differ. The article promoted a lot of questions from users wondering if competitors to Dropbox had similar terms and whether all online companies take control of your works. The recent changes to the Dropbox terms of service highlighted the fact that the company can do what they want with your files, although there is still some question on exactly what that means. Although studies show that users rarely read these legal documents, they are the binding forces that determine what a company can do with your personal information and private data.
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With more and more data being placed into the ubiquitous cloud, it’s becoming ever more important for users to read the terms of service and privacy policies that companies put out.
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