The Internet giant launched its new web browser yesterday to great fanfare and generally positive reviews, but as the confetti settles, many tech critics took a look at the application's terms of service – some with concern.
Two writers at CNET News said – with varying degrees of intensity – that Google was asking users to give up some privacy to use Chrome. They noted this passage from the terms of service:
"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."
That caught the attention of CNET's Ina Fried.
"Although you retain any copyrights to content you own and use in the browser, Google says it has a right to display some of your content, in conjunction with promoting its services," he wrote.
CNET's Matt Asay found this language more troubling. He compared Google's broad terms of service to similarly broad language that Microsoft included with one of its products in 2001, and he worried that such language asks users to give up too much.
"My concern is that this language is so broad that Google could, if it were so inclined, invade user privacy on a grand scale," he wrote. "The terms of service allow it. Only Google's best intentions prevent it."
Adult industry lawyer Ira Rothken called this passage "unclear," though he added that other legal codes would probably stop Google from taking liberties with users' content.
"If Google used third party content that was transmitted through their browser for something other than the intended service, it would either not be covered by their license or would be vulnerable to attack under a number of statutes from unfair business practices to antitrust," he told XBIZ.
But other pundits remain unconvinced. One lawyer sounded the loudest alarm.
"In other words, by posting anything (via Chrome) to your blog[s], any forum, video site, MySpace, iTunes, or any other site that might happen to be supporting you, Google can use your work without paying you a dime," Florida lawyer David Loschiavo wrote.
Online guru Brandon "Fight the Patent" told XBIZ he found the terms of service "disturbing." He speculated that Google would, by necessity, have to monitor all content uploaded through Chrome in order to find and choose content to use elsewhere.
But Brandon added that even though he didn't suspect Google of having bad intentions, he worried about how Google was going to store all this data.
"The big issue is not that Google would do anything bad with the data," he said. "It's that if they are doing central warehousing of a user's data, that it could be hacked and stolen."