Well, at least according to the Terms of Service.
Google Drive — the web behemoth’s cloud service where you can “create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff” — has just hit the bricks and it’s already coming under fire for its, ah, excessively grabby terms. Here’s what you’ll be agreeing to if you upload to Google Drive:
“Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence 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.
The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps).”
Translated from the legalese: upload something to Google Drive and we’ll make thongs out of your family photos if we feel like it. Doesn’t matter if you delete it! We’ll keep it! It’s our stuff now, bitch!
Google has since clarified that they don’t actually own the rights to your stuff, and honestly, it’s extremely unlikely Google would ever straight up just steal something uploaded to them with an expectation of privacy: it’d destroy their brand overnight.
Still, it’s always good to know exactly what you’re giving up when you use someone else’s server space.
(Image via Google)