Sun 16 Oct 2016 18:02

The Price of Google
I am a Canadian still living in the city in which I was born. I love living in Canada, but life in Canada has its price. Al Purdy, the late 20th century Canadian poet, once wrote about Canada as a country where everyone knows, but nobody talks about, the fact that you can die from simply being outside. It is true, of course: almost everywhere in Canada, the winter is cold enough that a sufficient number of hours outside without protection can lead to death by exposure. But this basic fact is designed into pretty much everything in Canadian life, it is simply accepted as a given by well over thirty million Canadians, and we cope: we wear the right winter clothes, we heat and insulate our buildings in winter, we equip our cars with the right tires, and life goes on. Despite the Canadian winter, Canada is a great place to live.

Google offers a lot of very good free web services: it is "a great place to live" on the Internet, and their services are used by hundreds of milliions of people all over the world. While Google seems about as far removed from a Canadian winter as you can imagine, there's something in their Terms of Service that people seem to rarely talk about, something that might have a bit of a chilling effect on one's initial ardor.

Google, to its credit, has a very clear and easy-to-read Terms of Service document. Here's an excerpt from the version of April 14, 2014, which is the most current version at the time I write this.

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).

When you submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use such content for the purpose of our Services. This continues even if you stop using our Services.

As you can see, this is pretty broad. You are granting Google and their partners the right to use your content for Google's Services (present and future) anywhere in the world, forever. While it does say that it must be used for the purpose of their Services, it doesn't limit itself to existing Services and it doesn't constrain what a "Service" might be. Since developing and offering Services, broadly understood, pretty much covers the gamut of what Google does as a company, the answer is Yes: by submitting content to their services, you are granting Google and their partners the right to use your content anywhere in the world, forever, for a broadly unconstrained set of purposes.

So does this mean nobody should use Google? Does the Canadian winter mean that nobody should live in Canada? After all, as Al Purdy writes, in Canada you can die from simply being outside.

Well, no, of course not. While Google has the right to do broadly unconstrained things with our content that we submit to them, their self -interest is typically aligned with our's: they want us to entrust our content to them, because they use it to earn money to operate. Therefore, to persuade us to keep submitting content to them, they will work hard to protect and secure the content they already have, in ways they think we consider important. For this reason, I think it's not unreasonable to trust Google with some of my content: I believe they are likely to protect it in sensible ways. Other content I choose not to submit to Google. Just as I am prepared for a Canadian winter, knowing it is the price I pay to live in Canada, I continue to use some Google services, knowing that they will keep and use my content. Many Google services are very good and well worth using, much of my content is not very sensitive, and I trust Google enough to share content with them.

I do wonder, however, how many Google users really understand the rights they are granting to Google. Canada has been around for centuries: the Canadian winter is no secret. But the implications of Google's broad right to use our content are not quite so obvious. It's not really so clear how Google is using the content or might use it in the future, and even if we trust Google, can we trust all those who might put pressure on Google? Quite frankly, we really don't know yet how Google's massive repository of our collective content can be used. We can envision wonderful outcomes: historians a century or two hence coming to insightful conclusions about early twenty-first century society, for example, but we can also envision outcomes not quite so sanguine: for example, a twenty-first century version of Orwell's 1984, a dystopian world of "thought-crimes" and "doublespeak" where content is is scanned for dissent from a prevailing ideology. A certain degree of caution may be warranted: in the case of Google, unlike Canada, we may not have yet seen how severe winter can be. A certain degree of caution is warranted. Yes, use Google, but use it knowing what you are doing.

One last thing to be said: I focus on Google here, but the same issues hold for Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and other purveyors of free services over the Internet. Read their Terms of Service to learn what rights you are granting by your use of their services, and decide on the basis of that knowledge how to use their services, and even whether you use their services at all. After all, even Canadians sometimes choose to spend winter in Florida, Mexico, or Arizona.

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