Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
Google Drive – Why All the Rumpus?
April 30, 2012
The introduction of Google Drive, an online storage offering (yes, that means the cloud) has started a firestorm of comments and comparisons to other services such as SkyDriveand Dropbox. It's one thing to talk about the amount of storage you get and what the costs are when doing a comparison, but there has been a rumpus indeed over the terms of service and privacy implications.
The rumpus is focused on how Google will handle users' data. I am puzzled by the hoopla because Google's Terms of Service (TOS) changed on March 1, 2012 and unified terms across all of Google's products, including Drive. Apparently, it has now become all the rage to actually read the Terms of Service.
There's nothing new here folks. The data you store on Drive is still your data – the TOS makes that clear. If you want to protect that data, make sure you have a strong 12-character password (more than 17,000 years – today – to crack that as opposed to a little under two hours for ANY 8-character password).
Also, be aware that Drive doesn't encrypt your files – you'll have to use a third-party product to do that. And if you do encrypt, you lose the ability to preview files and you prevent Drive's OCR engine from being able to scan your files.
I'm sticking with Dropbox – most of the time I don't care if my files are encrypted, but if I do, I'll encrypt them before transmission. Dropbox will encrypt but it keeps the decryption key, whereas, if I encrypt them, only I have the key.
Admittedly, Google's Terms of Service are written in weaselly legalese (did I just repeat myself?). And its Privacy Policy, a separate document, doesn't always seem in harmony with the TOS. The Privacy Policy says that Google will never bypass your share settings – this is particularly good for users of Drive, because your files are, by default, private.
However, be aware that the TOS gives Google the right to repurpose public content (even though what you post still legally belongs to you) so you need to look at OTHER Google services you're using to make sure you haven't made public (for instance) photos that you wouldn't want to see in a Google ad. Is Google likely to play that sort of game? Probably not – it would raise a hue and cry among its customers.
Bottom line, the press on Google's Drive has been overblown when it comes to the TOS – but as a tip, you can get a better deal from Microsoft's Skydrive (7GB of free storage vs. 5GB from Google Drive).
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