Thursday, September 4, 2008

Google Chrome

Finally google launched its browser "Chrome" but truly speaking it didn't impress me much.
The first thing that I came to know was about the objectionable EULA for chrome. The original license agreement had following lines in its setion 11:

11.1 ...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...


Summing up in simpler words by agreeing to this license a user gives Google right to:
o Save his bank id and password..
o Display his private albums publicly..
o Share his private information with other companies..
o Use any copyright material he publishes through Chrome..

Another line says that:
11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.

No, I don't have power to grant Google access to my company's forum, which means I (and millions of other users) can't use Chrome. And if a user agrees to the above license, its he who is responsible for any information leak that Google can do, because agreeing to the license means that he has the authority to grant these rights to Google. which he doesn't has.

And, after all this Google puts out a statement saying the terms of service for Chrome was simply copied from other applications it has been designing and the overly intrusive copyright aspects were a mistake and will be corrected.
I don't believe that a company like Google doesn't inspects its license agreements closely before presenting them. I suspect if it was just a trick on common user who usually don't read the license agreements before signing up for web services or software. This way Google would get access to almost everything (private or public) available on internet without being held responsible for anything, as according to the license its the user who is lying by saying that he has the authority to allow Google to use all the sensitive information on his company's website that otherwise is only available to the site members!!

According to the latest updates Google modified the EULA to remove these lines. What bothers me is the fact that Chrome was designed to send everything to the Google servers, just removing these lines from the agreement doesn't means that the content is not being sent to the Google servers. Till now many users would have downloaded and installed Chrome that would be sending loads of information to the Google servers right now. Either Google would be storing that information anyway or would be just discarding it thereby wasting network bandwidth. What I believe is that Google is a company that can store all this sensitive information and keep it hidden so that they can't be held.

Till now I am pretty satisfied with Firefox 3, and don't really see a reason to switch to Chrome.

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