Do no evil?

Okay, I really need to quit writing blog posts and get seriously to work on my term paper about open access journal publishing for my library management class. But I think this post from Jaqui Cheng on Ars Technica is worthy of note. Google is negotiating with the FCC over the amount of the fine it will face for "unintentionally" bypassing privacy protections on the Safari Web browser. Reader comments on this post make much of Google's continuous violations of its own motto, "Don't be evil."

This caught my attention because it was so closely related to the subject of my most recent post. Although I didn't mention it, David Sirota used Google to illustrate his concerns that folks who store material on the cloud could lose important rights to their work.

As The Los Angeles Times reported, Google’s announcement of its “Google Drive” came with the promise that users will “retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content.” But when you save files to Google’s new hard-drive folder in the cloud, the terms of service you are required to agree to gives Google “a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute (your) content” as the company sees fit.

As Sirota notes, Google has an innocent explanation for this--they insist they're merely getting your permission to allow you to share your stored material with others. But keep in mind that Google, like Facebook and other "free" online services, makes its profits from mining and selling our personal information. Maybe it's time to reconsider whether this kind of "free" is a good deal.