...the Terms of Service for the new Google Drive may open a new legal argument that hurts adoption of cloud storage for everyone. To see why this can happen, it helps to understand how courts interpret the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which provides that the people shall “be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures…”
Dropbox — terms
here:
“Your Stuff & Your Privacy: 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.”
Microsoft’s SkyDrive — terms
here:
“5. Your Content: 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 — terms
here:
“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).”
Google, WTF? Your terms of service for Google Drive absolutely destroy any argument that content uploaded to your cloud storage service has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Therefore, data on Google Drive is not subject to subpoena and is clearly open to viewing by law enforcement under the Third Party Doctrine.
But wait, it gets better. Google is one of the largest cloud providers on the planet. Once Google decimates Fourth Amendment protections for their cloud storage, how long will it take for law enforcement and courts to make the argument that all cloud storage shouldn’t be protected by the Fourth Amendment? Not long. Google is a large corporate citizen, large enough to set precedent with their actions.
