There may no be such a thing as a free lunch in real life, but it is different on the internet where companies are falling over themselves to give you free services such as photo hosting, video storage, email, word processing and spreadsheets.
A common feature of these services is that what we do is increasingly being stored on the web and not on our hard drives. Most of the time this is a huge advantage because it seems much safer to have one’s personal treasures stored on their servers with their back-up facilities rather than on a local disk, which might crash and which has to be changed every few years.
It was while I was writing this article that Google’s admirable document service, which I use all the time for writing, suddenly wasn’t there. Instead a chirpy message popped up saying that the bad news was that we (the users) had found a bug, but the good news was that they were attending to it.
This was a timely reminder that practically everything I do with my computer these days, from emailing to virtual worlds, is happening on the web. Since, whisper it quietly, I don’t always do a back-up, this means that my life’s work is in someone else’s custody. And since it is free, you have to be pretty brazen to complain.
But if you do you won’t get much joy, as I discovered from re-reading the terms and conditions that most people pass over because there is no way they are going to change them for you or me.
Clause 17 of Microsoft’s terms state: “We may change the service or delete features at any time and for any reason. We may cancel or suspend your service at any time. Our cancellation or suspension may be without cause and/or without notice. Upon service cancellation, your right to use the service stops right away.”
Well, thanks for that. Microsoft is among the better ones as it at least stresses that you may have other rights.
Yahoo! disclaims responsibility for deletions, misdeliveries or storage failures, adding: “You agree that Yahoo! may under certain circumstances and without prior notice immediately terminate your Yahoo! account, any associated email address, and access to the service.”
So what about Google, which has built trust into its brand? After praising itself for its dedication to innovation, it adds: “As part of this continuing innovation, you acknowledge and agree that Google may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the services (or any features within the services) to you or to users generally at Google’s sole discretion, without prior notice to you.” Well, that’s that, then.
I turned finally to the virtual world Second Life, where regular users pay significant sums to be part of a service that, highly unusually, gives participants the legal rights to the things they create (buildings, clothes and so forth) in addition to ownership of land. But what’s this in the small print?
“Linden Lab (owner of Second Life) has the right at any time for any reason or no reason to change and/or eliminate any aspect(s) of the service as it sees fit in its sole discretion.” It turns out that SL‘s internal currency, the Linden dollar, is not really a currency at all but “a limited licence right available for purchase or free distribution at Linden Lab’s discretion and is not redeemable for monetary value from Linden Lab”.
It adds: “You agree that Linden Lab has the absolute right to manage, regulate, control, modify and/or eliminate such currency as it sees fit in its sole discretion.”
Even when you pay for services, you don’t get more rights. Danger may seem remote as it is in the companies’ self-interest to sustain a service. But think back 10 or 20 years and ask how much of the small amounts you stored on your disks are available now, and then fast-forward 20 years and ask how much of a far bigger proportion of your life will still be around when companies have been taken over and formats changed.
Maybe it is time to think of modest charges if companies take responsibility for our data. — Guardian Unlimited Â