Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Chrome EULA

There's an interesting clause in the EULA for Chrome:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. 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.

where Services is defined as:

1.1 Your use of Google’s products, software, services and web sites (referred to collectively as the “Services” in this document and excluding any services provided to you by Google under a separate written agreement) is subject to the terms of a legal agreement between you and Google. “Google” means Google Inc., whose principal place of business is at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States. This document explains how the agreement is made up, and sets out some of the terms of that agreement

Chrome is, I believe, a Google product, and so falls into the definition of Services.  Hence, according to the EULA, Google can do pretty much anything with any information that you "submit, post or display".  I suspect that this is a mistake on their part, and that they've just cut'n'pasted a little to much from the EULA's for some of their other services.  It's certainly at odds with the privacy policy for Chrome.

However, if you're worried about such things, then I'd suggest that you don't use Chrome for anything sensitive.  Note that this licence only applies to the executable installation; if you download the source and build it yourself then you are covered by a regular Open Source licence.  It'll be interesting to see how long it takes them to re-word this...

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