The launch of Google Drive this week brings to the forefront the issue of privacy and the use of cloud storage services.
It’s not that Google’s privacy policies are significantly better or worse than competing services, such as Microsoft SkyDrive, Apple iCloud, Dropbox, SugarSync and SpiderOak. It’s more that big-name vendors are making it so darn easy and cheap to store personal photos, documents and audio files that these issues now threaten to affect a huge number of users.
For example, Google offers 5GB of free storage and Microsoft 7GB, so why not take advantage of the convenience of having content in the cloud and being able to share it with anyone? Well, there is no reason, as long as you know the risks.
In general, the privacy policies for all the service providers are similar, as The Washington Post points out. Vendors acknowledge they don’t own the data and promise they won’t access it, other than to operate their services. The latter is important to the companies, because they need to copy and move files and folders around their servers in order to provide backup and file sharing and to develop new services.
The services do have some differences, though:
Google Drive:
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