No Privacy on Amazon’s Cloud Drive

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | March 29, 2011, 9:02am PDT

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols


Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka sjvn, has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting edge, PC operating system; 300bps was a fast Internet connection; WordStar was the state of the art word processor; and we liked it! His work has been published in everything from highly technical publications (IEEE Computer, ACM NetWorker, Byte) to business publications (eWEEK, InformationWeek, ZDNet) to popular technology (Computer Shopper, PC Magazine, PC World) to the mainstream press (Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, BusinessWeek).

Who couldn’t love the idea of the new Amazon Cloud Drive? You get at least 5GBs of free cloud-based storage, and its trivial to get 20GBs of free storage on Amazon Cloud Drive. Used in concert with the Amazon Cloud Player you get a fine cloud-based music player that can be used either from a Web browser or on Android tablets with the Amazon MP3 App. The new Amazon consumer cloud service also works well. It’s just too bad that you have to give up all privacy to use it.
Don’t believe me? Read the Amazon Cloud Drive Terms of Use for yourself. In particular, take a glance at: Section 5.2:
“5.2 Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law”
Wow. Amazon can do pretty much anything they want with your files Like say let the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) inspect your music files for any signs that you haven’t pay full price for them. You remember the RIAA; they’re the ones who want $75-trillion from LimeWire for allowing 11,000 songs to be illegally shared.
As my pal, Jan Wildeboer, Red Hat’s EMEA Open Source Evangelist put it, “I suspect that continuous inspection is part of the deal to get the music industry accept these offerings–IP radicalism at its best.”  He’s almost certainly right. In return for the “right” to play your music from the cloud, you have to put up with Big Brother.
I like Amazon’s services, but I don’t like it well enough to put up with this nonsense. Besides, there area already services out there that offer similar services without such draconian privacy violations. For cloud-based music, there’s SoundCloud and Mougg. If it’s just cloud-based storage you want, Dropbox is still my cloud-storage service of choice.
Nice try Amazon, but you’ll excuse me if I don’t give you the right to access, retain, use and disclose my account information and my files.
See Also:

Amazon launches Cloud Drive: An easy to use tablet play that takes AWS consumer

Test drive of Amazon Cloud Drive for MP3s

Amazon launches Android Appstore

Is Amazon Set to Go After Apple in the Mobile Space?

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