[chisleu]

Read their TOS and compare it to Google Drive's TOS.

The insane rights the Google TOS grants to Google are why it costs ~ 1/2 as much.

It is also an indicator that Dropbox is less shady. They don't grant themselves rights to do anything with your data outside of the normal things you need them to do to offer the dropbox service for your use.

Unlike Google, which could for instance, use your personal photos of your kid eating ice cream to try to sell you ice cream via road side LED billboards.

[shawnhermans]

You claim that Google could use personal photos of my kid eating ice cream to sell advertising? This seems directly against their terms of service found at http://www.google.com/policies/terms/.

> Some of our Services allow you to upload, submit, store, send or receive content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.

Do you have any proof of this ever happening? Do you have any legal case that support your claim? Can you please point to the text in their TOS that leads you to believe this?

[chisleu]

You need to actually read the TOS for dropbox. It says they can use your stuff for any service they offer now or in the future.

I don't need proof. You need to go read the TOS I mentioned already.

[sliverstorm]

I think you may need to re-read the comments you yourself wrote and replied to.

[chisleu]

Here ya go.

"When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through 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. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). "

They changed the TOS to rephrase, but didn't remove the infringing portion. It used to say any service offered now or in the future, and now it says "to make new services."

The fact is, my original statement stands.

They can quite literally use your content for any reason because they can use it to develop new services (such as, say, personalized road side advertising.)

There is nothing legally stopping them from doing it, and if you have been paying attention to the issues highlighted by Snowden and others, there is little backlash to them as a company for doing very evil things such as leaving inter-datacenter communication unencrypted allowing the NSA and others to snoop upon Gmail and all other google services as the data replicates across locations.

Good times talking to you. Appreciate the down votes.

Once again, make sure you actually read the damned thing in question before even replying to a comment about it. You ignorant, uninformed points are worthless.

Also, here is the dropbox TOS: " Your Stuff is yours. These Terms don't give us any rights to Your Stuff except for the limited rights that enable us to offer the Services.

We need your permission to do things like hosting Your Stuff, backing it up, and sharing it when you ask us to. Our Services also provide you with features like photo thumbnails, document previews, email organization, easy sorting, editing, sharing and searching. These and other features may require our systems to access, store and scan Your Stuff."

REMARKABLY less ambiguous, and in fact enumerates the Services they offer. They literally only want to host your data. Google wants to data mine your data, even if you delete the data and your google account, google wants to keep using your data, forever.

This isn't the same thing.

[ubernostrum]

I'm aware of nothing in Google's terms which isn't in the terms of every other user-generated-content service that has lawyers on staff.

In order to make copies (distributed storage, network traffic, etc.) and show copies to people -- including you, or anyone you choose to share a file or post with -- they basically have to have a license from you, or they're potentially on the wrong side of copyright law.

[chisleu]

Then you need to read the damned TOS side by side with dropbox. They are significantly different in scope and the rights allowed.

[eli]

I think you're misunderstanding the TOS. I do not think Google is subsidizing their storage costs by abusing your private photos.

[chisleu]

I think you aren't actually reading it. I do not think Dropbox is less good at running storage than Google or Amazon, yet Google is 1/2 the cost.

[skuhn]

The reality here is that the cost to operate doesn't matter to Google. They can keep subsidizing Drive with revenue from Search Ads long after they have pushed Dropbox out of business, if they choose to do so.

This is why Dropbox (smartly) does not want to compete on price -- instead they want to compete on quality. There's no way to be cheaper than Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon in the long run, because they each have other businesses that are licenses to print money. If one or more of them decide to heavily subsidize their online storage product, they can outlast you.

However, it turns out that all of the money in the world can't magically make a great product. You still have to actually do the hard work.

[shdon]

They might not be doing it (and probably aren't), but they do have the right.

[shdon]

Interesting how I'm getting downvoted for stating this. The language does come awfully close to explicitly stating just the thing:

"We collect information to provide better services to all of our users – from figuring out basic stuff like which language you speak, to more complex things like which ads you’ll find most useful"

even explained thus:

"For example, if you frequently visit websites and blogs about gardening, you may see ads related to gardening as you browse the web."

and they say that they base it on:

"Information we get from your use of our services."

Again, not explicitly named, but not forbidden either by their own privacy policy.

[Raphmedia]

We all know that the reason Google is running face recognition and photo recognition software on your all your files is to cross reference it with databases of paedophilia and terrorism !

[Raphmedia]

Why the downvotes?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11012008/Paedophi...