MEPIS Community Forum

Just throwing this out there. Wondering what people think about this new service and if anyone has signed up for it, have they compared it to any of the other cloud services they may have.

I've read that once documents, photos, etc are up loaded to the Drive, the content is now theirs, not yours. Can anyone clarify this?

They don't get ownership of your files, but they do get a broad license to store, display, modify, perform and create derivative works.

If you think about it, to be legal they have to have those rights to perform the promised functions. When you pull up a stored video on your Kindle, and they reformat it for that device Google is creating a derivative. If a collaborator on a document you've stored on Google drive does a Google translation, again a derivative work is created.

The main sticking point for some is that the license doesn't terminate when you remove your files or even delete your account.
It is limited by this text:
But you can see that leaves them leeway to use your data to promote their own business ends even after you have deleted your account.

In then end, I wouldn't put anything unencrypted on a GoogleDrive that I wouldn't post on Facebook. It's not that I think Google will abuse their rights - but if they do I would have agreed to it in advance...

I read a few lukewarm articles yesterday. Most aren't all that complimentary.

The reviewers that came at it from a privacy/security angle recommended Spider Oak as a better alternative.

I've not gotten involved with any of this stuff myself, so have no basis on which it judge. I don't need to synch a bunch of machines, and do my backing up to a NAS box on my LAN. Yeah, if my house burns down it'll be a drag.

I trust Google, and I don't see any problem with their terms. Besides, instead of spreading my files to a number of services it's better to stick with one, Google already knows all there is to know about me, I don't want to spread my info to other services that are less trusty or don't employ security protocols as Google, for example Google has two factor authentication, I think this is essential, I would not use a service that doesn't have two factor authentication

I have been using Wuala, all data is encrypted and only you have the password. They do not keep any password records.

And they've just upped the free storage from 2GB to 5GB!


Phil

Is there something to use, ie: Dolphin, to access Google Drive since there is no Linux client as of this date?

For now you can use the browser http://drive.google.com but a Linux client is in the works...