Google Chrome: Big Brother Browser?
Are you in the mood to add to Google’s already vast depository of personal information about you? If so, you’ll be delighted by Google’s new Chrome browser, now available as a beta download.
Yes, Google has released a brand-new open source browser, like Firefox, built (apparently) using Safari’s engine. Chrome makes impressive performance claims, and early reports say the browser is indeed fast and light. Google directly took on the issue of poor JavaScript performance with Chrome, though reports suggest many sites’ JavaScript breaks when viewed with Chrome—which makes sense, since JavaScript is typically written for specific browsers, and Chrome is brand new.
The big news with Chrome, however, has to be the avalanche of questions about privacy issues and Goggle’s overreaching End User License Agreement (EULA) raised by savvy tech bloggers. Let’s start with the EULA: users who downloaded Chrome this morning unwittingly agreed to give Google an extraordinary non-exclusive royalty-free license to do basically anything with any content you use the browser to view or transmit:
“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.”
A reasonable reading of this contract would mean that if you are a photographer, for example, and you simply view your photographs using Google’s Chrome Browser, you’ve just given Google an almost unrestricted right to do anything with your photos.
Faced with a lot of sudden scrutiny, Google has decided to rescind that portion of the EULA (retroactively), explaining that the document was a form-contract used in conjunction with Google’s other services, and hadn’t been adequately tailored for the Chrome product.
Okay…good. But that makes me wonder what other Google services those terms remain active in? Gmail? Feedburner? In any case, despite Google’s quick response, the fact that that section of the EULA existed in the the first place does not inspire much confidence in Google’s commitment to ‘Not Being Evil.’
Further concerns remain: the Chrome browser has a number of features that collect information and transmit it (potentially or actually) to Google, as reported by Cnet.
Does software that logs keystrokes before you even press the ‘enter’ button really sound like something you want on your machine?
To be fair, Google has worked diligently to reassure skittish users that Chrome really isn’t going to spy on them—see Matt Cutt’s blog for a personal explanation.
And take heart: prior to the existence of the blogosphere, most of these issues would have simply gone unnoticed, much less remedied. Hopefully, the debut of Google’s Chrome browser will inspire users to think more carefully about issues of privacy and content rights, as well as be more selective about what software they allow on their machines.
And maybe, just maybe, this experience will help motivate Google to have a similar conversation with itself.
Tags: chrome, eula, google, privacy
September 4th, 2008 at 4:47 am
Google has changed their EULA to remove all the verbiage that everyone is so up in arms about. See the update in Matt Cutt’s blog for details.
For what it’s worth, this exact same misunderstanding happened when we (Zenbe.com) launched our first iPhone App. Because the app allows users to share their content with other people, it’s necessary for Zenbe to have the legal right to copy your content and make it “publicly” available to any other users you may share that content with. It turns out to be pretty difficult to phrase that right in legal terms that won’t come across as both scary, even Orwellian, to your average user, and yet still be strict enough to hold up in court should the need arise.
In our case, we had a very negative review posted about our app on the iPhone App Store. The author copy/pasted terms from our EULA that no longer exist. In spite of this it’s now the #1 review due to the nearly 600 “helpful” ratings it’s received from people who decide not to even look at our app. Unfortunately we have no way of contacting the author, and Apple has been completely unresponsive. Kind of a bummer.
It’s really great to see users holding companies accountable for this sort of thing, but I would encourage anyone who criticizes a company for something like this to be diligent in following up to make sure the review/blog/whatever they post is updated properly if and when the company takes action. Failure to do so is really unfair to the parties involved.