[HN Gopher] Google does not want rights to things you do using C...
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Google does not want rights to things you do using Chrome (2008)
Author : gigaArpit
Score : 116 points
Date : 2025-03-01 08:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mattcutts.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mattcutts.com)
| isodev wrote:
| Interesting how things have changed in the past 17 years! Google
| of today, would rather own one's thoughts if they could, let
| alone things we write in their address bar.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across
| the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La
| Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a
| fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was
| right, that we were winning. . . .
|
| And that, I think, was the handle--that sense of inevitable
| victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or
| military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply
| prevail. There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs.
| We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and
| beautiful wave. . . .
|
| So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep
| hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of
| eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--that place where
| the wave finally broke and rolled back.
|
| -Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Per "Breakfast with Hunter" that's his favorite piece of
| writing of his career. Great citation.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| It's interesting how this quote can apply to so many
| different things throughout history.
|
| I know it specifically references the 1960's San Francisco
| counter culture but it's a poignant quote because it can
| apply beyond that too.
| barbazoo wrote:
| One day they'll write the things into the address bar for us :)
| isodev wrote:
| "I'm feeling lucky" but brain-implant edition :))
| Y_Y wrote:
| "My feelings are exclusively dictated by advertisers!"
| relaxing wrote:
| That's basically the goal of the last decade of changes to
| Google search culminating in AI summaries: give you the
| information they think you want on the results page to stop
| you from leaving for another url.
| bear141 wrote:
| In my mind it's more like they give you what they want you
| to accept in these results and the AI summaries. It really
| seems like the days where any of these giant corps gave you
| what you actually wanted are long past.
| homebrewer wrote:
| > would rather own one's thoughts if they could
|
| This is actually probably coming at some point in the not so
| distant future:
|
| https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/13/229-...
| saagarjha wrote:
| Is this still the case?
| lblume wrote:
| No, the generic Google ToS (https://policies.google.com/terms)
| now apply universally and grant this kind of access.
| vincnetas wrote:
| Looks like this article might need a new "Updated" entry because
| current chrome ToS points to generic :
| https://policies.google.com/terms
| koolala wrote:
| To keep things simple (for them) they get rights to everything
| :(
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| important fact missing in the article (maybe even from title):
| matt never spoke for google and didn't work at google since the
| mid 2010s i think.
|
| he's an early hire who became a star Obama-era DOGEdepto-esque
| (mostly for good) technocrat, which then caused most of his
| peers to be hired left and right in hopes to get access to that
| cadre.
| johndhi wrote:
| Great find. Yes, things are different now. So too for SaaS.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Matt Cutts was one of the Google search OGs.
|
| The kind of cultural values (e.g. make user happy all else will
| follow) he and a number of other original Google employees
| believed in and tried to defend have loooong been overridden by
| the Sundars and other Prabakhars who only kowtowed to the short-
| term demands of wall street.
|
| Cutts, Ben Gomes and similar-minded do-gooders have all neatly
| been benched a long time ago.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yeah when I was there (2011-2021) you could just see the
| positioning from "slightly hypocritical, probably naive, but
| overall in favour of the user and classic 1990s Internet
| principles" to... what it is now... shifting in a slow
| inevitable and painful wave. The last 5 years I was there
| especially.
| pimlottc wrote:
| He also went on to serve as the second administrator for the
| United States Digital Service, which has just recently been
| hijacked and gutted by DOGE. Sadly it's not just the cultural
| values of Google that have shifted since then.
| coliveira wrote:
| The Google founders were never out there to do any good. They
| started hijacking web content, with the excuse that it was a
| scientific project in Stanford, then right away converted that
| into a for profit corporation (similar to what OpenAI did).
| Next they planned to do the same with books, before they were
| stoped by a tsunami of lawsuits.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| they aspire to "don't be evil" which isn't exactly the same
| as "do be good"
| dang wrote:
| ...but still helps people on HN occasionally!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42918310
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| I'm sorry, but please stop pretending that a company which came
| about thanks to a DARPA grant and then received seed funding
| from the investment company used by the US intelligence
| agencies to fund projects they like, _had noble intentions at
| any point in time._
| tptacek wrote:
| "Prabakhars"?
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Prabakhars
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhakar_Raghavan
|
| also:
|
| https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
|
| And you are correct, there's just one. The additional 's' was
| meant to mean "and others very much like him".
| eykanal wrote:
| Any reason why this is on the front page today? Is there some
| context for why this is interesting now?
| greyface- wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612
| notpushkin wrote:
| Firefox. [1]
|
| Note that Google does want the rights to things you do using
| Chrome now, too.
|
| [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&query=firefox
| johndhi wrote:
| Because it's very contradictory to Google's current stance (we
| can do whatever we want with your data)
| nige123 wrote:
| There was always content in users' click paths / search trails.
|
| Google has mined that for profit from the beginning. Cutts and Co
| turned a blind eye here.
|
| It was ALL OK though - because Google's mission was DONT BE EVIL!
|
| In 2008 Google was besieged by SEO consultants spamming their
| index.
|
| Mining the collective intelligence of the hooman's search trails
| was their algorithmic escape clause.
|
| Their escape clause in 2025?
|
| Mine for MORE!
| egypturnash wrote:
| This sort of agreement keeps on popping up. Again and again.
|
| The most forgiving reading of the _intent_ of this sort of
| agreement is that "it is the basic function of a web browser to
| transfer your stuff across the internet, and it is the basic
| function of a website to do stuff like make thumbnails of your
| images and send them to people looking at your stuff, and you are
| cool with us doing this" but it _always_ ends up being written in
| the most incredibly grabby way possible, demanding a perpetual,
| irrevocable license for all potential future uses so that you can
| 't sue if one thumbnail gets forgotten when you delete your stuff
| or because it got turned into a new format or something.
|
| And this kind of license just happens to cover other stuff nobody
| thought of at the time like "we can totally train an AI on
| everything you generate and let people ask it to generate work
| explicitly derivative of _your_ work without owing you a single
| cent ". Which is a total dick move. So's stuff like "track
| everything you do and share that data with a distributed
| surveillance industry that sprung up around advertising". And
| eventually some asshole comes along and says "hey I could make a
| lot of money doing this thing that everyone "agreed" to when they
| scrolled down that lengthy terms of service and hit OK".
| 20after4 wrote:
| I worked at deviantArt back in the early 2010s, they notably
| had a user agreement that did not claim any rights more than
| necessary, and it was revocable by the user without jumping
| through hoops. So it's not necessary to do things this way,
| companies do it intentionally because they don't care about the
| rights of their users.
| yakcyll wrote:
| The corollary to this is that companies do this because they
| are incentivised to do so by their very fundamental goal - to
| make profit. Whatever pressure that does not lead to a loss
| on the quarterly report is, in practice, no pressure at all.
| If we truly want these predatory practices to stop, we have
| to start promoting different incentives, different
| priorities, and by 'we' I really mean 'each and every one of
| us collectively'.
| pmichaud wrote:
| I am building a company that accepts user generated data, and
| one surprising struggle is getting my lawyers to stop writing
| shitty, overbroad, abusive TOS. They are just so used to it,
| and all the templates and boiler plate is designed to give me
| everything and the user nothing. And if I want to do better
| by ny users I have to fight and cajole my own lawyers and pay
| extra for them to do the extra work of writing terms that
| aren't predatory because that is unusual and custom.
|
| It sucks.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Wishing you luck, you are doing some good work putting in
| the effort to respect the data of the user, something which
| stands out in a seas full of companies who do not care.
| remus wrote:
| > It sucks.
|
| It depends on your perspective surely? As a lawyer your job
| is typically to protect your client from legal risk, so if
| users are happy to sign a really expansive set of terms
| (which experience shows is the case) that gives grants lots
| of permission to do stuff with their data then that's low
| risk. If you as a business don't want that then you need to
| make it explicit that you're willing to take on some extra
| risk.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| But didn't DeviantArt ultimately decide to opt-in every work
| hosted on the platform to train its generative AI?
| egypturnash wrote:
| I definitely recall uproars over DA doing this exact same
| kind of overreach in their TOS! Possibly before you were
| around, doing the math on my user page there saying "deviant
| for 22y" tells me I opened my account there in 2003.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| This just seems like the right approach. It's never going to
| be safe to claim the rights to user uploaded content without
| verifying they hold the rights to it in the first place.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Companies do it because lawsuits are "explosive", if the
| Chrome team fucks up, they can bring down not only Chrome,
| but potentially the entirety of Google itself.
|
| Deviant Art's only product is Deviant art, so the upside in
| goodwill from a user-friendly agreement might be greater than
| the downside of some remote possiblity of a lawsuit. This
| isn't true about Google, which has many other products and
| revenue streams.
| immibis wrote:
| Mozilla doesn't need a "license" to everything you transmit
| over the internet in order for Firefox to facilitate
| transmitting it over the internet. In fact, Mozilla should
| never be able to touch things I transmit over the internet
| using Firefox. They only need a "license" if they are planning
| on wiretapping me and they want it to be legal.
| blagund wrote:
| IANAL but at least in some EU countries you can't give away all
| rights preemptively for usecases not yet known at the time. So
| a blanket giveaway doesn't necessarily include AI training (it
| is a different question if the people performing that act
| actually care).
| JohnnyLarue wrote:
| It's important to remember that no matter what they write in
| the agreement, they can will still be sued, and they can and
| may still be found at fault. So the utility of edge case
| disclaimers are questionable at best, and indicate 'evil'
| intent at worst.
| blibble wrote:
| if I use a pencil, I don't need to sign an absurd grant giving
| the company that made the pencil worldwide royalty free rights to
| use anything I create using it
|
| the legal entity that made the pencil is not involved in this
| process, and does not need to be
|
| correspondingly, Mozilla, the legal entity is not involved when I
| use their tool to submit a form on a third party website
|
| so there is some other motive for suddenly requiring this
|
| my bet: ads, tracking, and selling my output to the AI slop
| generating companies
|
| (IANAL)
| hackernewsdhsu wrote:
| They absolutely do want all the rights, they just got caught and
| have changed it "for now". They're modeling it after the music
| cartels.
|
| Can you say Mozilla?
|
| Shoot 'em all in the back!
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| >2008
|
| Back when google wasn't evil, did cool shit, and had a functional
| search engine.
| jedberg wrote:
| In case anyone didn't know, Matt (the blog author) was the head
| of Webspam at the time, and a Distinguished Engineer at Google
| (and semi-official spokesperson for Google web spam issues). He
| left Google eight years after writing this, and went to the USDS
| for a few years, and then retired I believe.
|
| Would be curious what Matt thinks of today's Google.
| bo1024 wrote:
| One takeaway of the Mozilla debacle is that software as a non-
| service is dying if not dead.
|
| What I mean is the concept that software could be a thing that
| someone just _obtains_ , like a pencil. The things you write with
| a pencil belong to you. The pencil belongs to you. You don't have
| an ongoing contractual licensing agreement with the pencil
| manufacturer that gives them a worldwide non-commercial right to
| reflect light off the graphite in order to display words.
|
| In 2008, Google had already begun to forget that software could
| be like a pencil. It seems that in 2025, even the concept is
| alien to lawyers and perhaps developers at Mozilla, and many
| other places. The do not understand how one could use a software
| tool without granting the company behind it a license to
| everything you do with the tool, because they do not understand
| the concept of software usage except as a business relationship
| between the user and the company who developed it.
| ljlolel wrote:
| If AI makes the cost of development low enough then some
| individuals or small teams will still sell software like a
| pencil
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Oh they understand the concept. Its just that the recurring
| revenue and data are more important and without competition or
| alternatives then why not take everything you can take from the
| user. What are they going to do? Stop using the internet?
| userbinator wrote:
| _What are they going to do? Stop using the internet?_
|
| Stop using newer versions of the software. Firefox is open-
| source, so forking and fixing the older versions before these
| hostile changes is not impossible.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| I hope this is true. I don't know how to maintain a web
| browser, hopefully those that do are willing to do the work
| to keep it running.
| sdrinf wrote:
| Mozilla is sooo fucked here. On one hand, it would take them
| approx ~1 sentence of blog to say "We won't sell your input info
| to anyone" and this drama goes away.
|
| OTOH: if the currently pending court case on anti-monopoly bars
| google from making payments to mozilla (which is about ~90%++ of
| their revenue), mozilla truly, and well is fucked. Meaning -they
| need to diversify, and they know it; they can't sell browsers,
| related services are heavily competed for, so ads & selling user
| data is broadly the only viable strat that can underwrite their
| existence.
|
| Of course, the community won't have it. And therein lies the rub:
| by going with google's bribe, on this long term, they wrote
| themselves into a corner they can't exit.
| Tostino wrote:
| They've had a decade and a half now to invest and diversify.
| I've been incredibly disappointed in every attempt.
|
| Honestly, just investing the good portion of the revenue from
| Google in an index fund and treating it like an endowment would
| probably have done better than they ended up.
| amelius wrote:
| > In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the
| same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many
| of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this
| means that the legal terms for a specific product may include
| terms that don't apply well to the use of that product.
|
| Ok, so what other Google products do want rights to the things I
| do?
|
| Smells fishy, to say the least.
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(page generated 2025-03-02 23:00 UTC)