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Cloud storage Terms of Service comparison: Avoid Google Drive

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Chances are this will never be an issue, but the standard Google terms are particularly egregious in the context of personal cloud storage.

Dropbox

https://www.dropbox.com/terms

"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."

SkyDrive

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/microsoft-service-agreement?SignedIn=1

"Except for material that we license to you, we don't claim ownership of the content you provide on the service. Your content remains your content. We also don't control, verify, or endorse the content that you and others make available on the service."

Google Drive

http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/

"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."

Edits:

  • Objections of selective quoting from the Google ToS seem fair, I originally only cut and paste the second paragraph since it contained the objectionable portion. Updating to include part of the first paragraph. Please note that this does not in any way alleviate the problems with Google Drive terms.
  • Adding links to terms of service pages.