Comcast’s Terms of Service for its Xfinity Internet service gives it, its agents, suppliers and affiliates the right to “reproduce, publish, distribute and display” the content worldwide. It also lets third parties copy, republish or distribute material posted or transmitted using Xfinity Internet.
This would include confidential information sent by a company employee or an independent contractor to authorized persons over the service, independent security analyst Randy Abrams warned Tuesday.
The “excessively broad language” of Comcast’s ToS “should be of concern,” Abrams told the E-Commerce Times.
“There are no limitations or privacy controls with ISPs,” he pointed out.
“The revised language in our Residential Services Agreement is meant to make it clear that we are expressly authorized by the customer to send around what the customer wants to send around where we are the conduit or intermediary,” said Comcast spokesperson Jenni Moyer.
“We are not taking their content,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
It’s not just Comcast. Google’s ToS gives it — and the third parties it works with — a “worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, and distribute” content users upload, submit, store, send or receive to or through its services.
This license continues even if a user stops using Google’s services — but the rights then apply to the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving Google’s services, and developing new ones.
Where Google and Comcast Differ
Some Google services may offer users ways to access and remove content that has been provided to them, and some have terms or settings that narrow the scope of Google’s use of the content users submit to those services.
“I have availed myself of these limitations at times,” Abrams said.
Google “doesn’t scan all traffic emanating from your computer,” he pointed out. “Most importantly, I do not have to use Google services. I can use 00000DuckDuckGo instead of [Google Search]. I can use Tutanota for email.”
Google “doesn’t have protected monopoly status in any market,” Abrams observed. “Due to government-granted regional monopolies, cable Internet service has one choice and no competition in many respects.”
The Danger of Sweeping Rights
The way Comcast’s and Google’s ToSes are worded “suggests that even if you store information with them they can use and repurpose it,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.
The wording suggests that these services own the content sent through their services, which “would make defending intellectual property nearly impossible,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
Users “would want to encrypt pretty much everything in order to protect it,” Enderle suggested, “but even if you do so, these firms would still have rights to the content if they could prove you used their services to store or transmit it.”
But Everybody’s Doing It
Like Google and Comcast, Facebook asserts that users give it a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free worldwide license to use any IP content such as photos and videos they post on or in connection with Facebook, subject to their privacy and application settings.
This IP license ends when users delete their IP content or their account unless their content has been shared with others and they haven’t deleted it.
The online services’ assertion of rights over users’ content can be considered the industry norm “and a frightening one,” Enderle remarked. If these companies employ users’ IP, they “could argue they already had a license to it. Authors and publishers couldn’t defend copyrights — and even patent rights could be considered assigned.”
That said, “the contracts are so one-sided that I have severe doubts whether the courts would defend positions like this [in the U.S.],” Enderle said. “It would be like a bank claiming ownership of anything you put in its safe deposit box or had on you when you walked into the bank.”
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The story behind the headlines:
Comcasts CEO repeatedly met with lifetime CIA asset Barry Soetoro to negotiate a deal which gave the secret government unrestricted access to Comcast customer traffic. Lavabit shut down over the same issue:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/08/lavabit-email-shut-down-edward-snowden
Spies no longer need a formal request or National Security Letter to access your Comcast account without a warrant because Comcast already sold you out in exchange for political favors and a piece of the action. Comcast is run by organized crime; the CIA’s close relationship with the mafia has been documented for decades. Gambling & prostitution are small potatoes now, compared to the broadband internet racket with millions of subscribers in captive markets each paying the cable cartel a dozen times what it actually costs them to provide the service. If you must use Comcast, encrypt EVERYTHING.
Industrial espionage meeting – no wiretaps here!
https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/08/obama-golfs-with-comcast-ceo-170524
(Notice how perpetual war for profit and warrantless mass surveillance are never discussed in the broadcast media, so they never become campaign issues. The public has a short memory, so manufactured racism & sexism are effective distractions.)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+cia
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/19/us-tech-giants-knew-nsa-data-collection-rajesh-de