Update: 4th Sept – The Register is now reporting that the Chrome licensing agreement has been changed. Section 11 now reads:
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services.
Sorted. Now…carry on.
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I’ve just been playing about with Google’s new web browser: Chrome. It’s got lots of nice features, and I’m sure they’re being written about all over the web. What caught my attention however is a discussion going on on ReadWriteWeb (see: Does Google Have Rights to Everything You Send Through Chrome?) regarding the Terms of Service covering the use of Chrome. The comments at the end of their post are also worth reading.
The issue is that Section 11 of the Chrome Terms of Service states:
11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services. [Emphasis added]
I’m sure those from more of a legal background may have a clearer understanding of the implications of this. Perhaps I am misunderstanding the meaning, however, it looks to me that anything I send through the Chrome browser (such as this blog post) is now licensed to Google to do with, more or less, as they please. While this isn’t too much of a problem when it comes to a blog post which is being published, and is intended to be public, is it a problem when composing emails or using web applications?
I would have some expectation of privacy when using web-based applications for work purposes. I would not like to see material that I wrote being republished simply because of the sofware I used to access the service. It would be a similar situation if, for example, Microsoft were claiming the right to modify and distribute any content I created in Word; it seems an unreasonable request. I think that such a service term may make sense for content-distribution or display types of services, but I can’t see the logic of it for a software application.
I’m sure there’ll be more on this over the coming days. As for the Chrome features – I like the resizable textareas, and the higlighting in the scrollbar when you do a word search. It will take some getting use to the way new tabs are opened when you click on a link in a page (they don’t open at the end of the tab list, as in Firefox). I’m also going to need some time to get used to having the tab list over the address bar. Aside from that, there is the lack of extensions to Firefox that I use regularly, which is a problem. Chrome doesn’t seem to have broken any of the sites I’ve done, which is a good thing….so far I quite like it.
Social?