Is that a thing "Anything you upload to our site belongs to us" I was wondering about that myself for my own services. If I can get people's data, then you could use that to train ML with and then your problem of lack of data is solved haha... but this is beyond me at this point just thinking out loud.
Many services have used this as a default for a long time, anything you give them is theirs - either through directly assigning ownership to them, or by giving them a perpetual license to use for almost any purpose they wish.
I've not actually checked this over recent years, but I feel like things have gotten slightly better, where services are no longer quite as bad as they used to be.. however I've no data to back that up..
Most of the time these were either misunderstandings, or wilfully misleading scare stories: These services need some sort of license to work. Even just to show you your own photos, you need to give Google/Facebook/Apple/whoever a license.
That license was usually quite liberal, i. e. "a non-exclusive, royalty-free perpetual license to perform your works...". That scared people, and suddenly everyone thought Facebook owns all you photos. But the [...] usually contained the conditions, or the reasoning. So, for example, they had the "perpetual" license to those works because it would have been difficult to securely eras everything from every backup. But you still had/have the right to stop their showing of your photos.
And they certainly never had the right to "perform" your works in the way that copyright is usually turned into money. They cannot, for example, sell your photos. Google never owned all the copyright in Harry Potter, even if the manuscripts were all sent via Gmail. Otherwise I'm pretty sure we'd have heard about it (It wouldn't be enforceable in court anyway, no more than some ToS clause transferring your house and firstborn).
What they can do is data mining. So Google can show you ads that match your inbox, and Facebook can train object recognition on your photos. But I'm not even sure if they need a license for that–it's just reading, not performing. They probably only need your consent for privacy reasons.
I wonder if the same applies to offering free storage, it's insane to me how One Drive offers 1 TB of free storage hahaha. Insane. But I could see the benefit of being able to use that influx of data for their benefit whatever it might be.
Photos contain private items, things like clothes. So they allow Google (and Apple, and MS, and Amazon) to construct "real-world" metrics to brands and vendors about which clothes they bought, maybe even with odds as to where they were bought, and maybe base advertising decisions on that.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 26.9 ms ] threadI've not actually checked this over recent years, but I feel like things have gotten slightly better, where services are no longer quite as bad as they used to be.. however I've no data to back that up..
That license was usually quite liberal, i. e. "a non-exclusive, royalty-free perpetual license to perform your works...". That scared people, and suddenly everyone thought Facebook owns all you photos. But the [...] usually contained the conditions, or the reasoning. So, for example, they had the "perpetual" license to those works because it would have been difficult to securely eras everything from every backup. But you still had/have the right to stop their showing of your photos.
And they certainly never had the right to "perform" your works in the way that copyright is usually turned into money. They cannot, for example, sell your photos. Google never owned all the copyright in Harry Potter, even if the manuscripts were all sent via Gmail. Otherwise I'm pretty sure we'd have heard about it (It wouldn't be enforceable in court anyway, no more than some ToS clause transferring your house and firstborn).
What they can do is data mining. So Google can show you ads that match your inbox, and Facebook can train object recognition on your photos. But I'm not even sure if they need a license for that–it's just reading, not performing. They probably only need your consent for privacy reasons.