With DropBox, Apple’s iCloud and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, no one really expected it to be long before Google brought out its own cloud-storage offering – after all, Google does have a history of relentlessly hopping on the bandwagon. Quite why anyone will use Google Drive over the other options is something of a mystery though, for a few reasons. Firstly, at this point, the people who are using cloud services already have an account with one of the others, and Google Drive is unlikely to offer functionality that the others can’t. Secondly, it offers 5GB free storage, which is more than DropBox’s 2GB but far less than the huge 25GB Microsoft offers with SkyDrive. With a DropBox app on Android, even Google’s own customers won’t require a subscription to Google Drive – unless, of course, Google does what it did to Twitter in its search engine and drop it in favour of Google+ for real-time search updates. It’s unlikely though, as that would mean barring the DropBox apps, which could alienate users. Storage capacity and offerings aside, what’s most worrisome about the new service is it showcases that Google still hasn’t adjusted its opinion on owning its users’ content, as PC World has also reported. Below is an image displaying the privacy policy for DropBox, SkyDrive and Google Drive:
With Google up to its usual tricks, will its claim to your data put you off its service in favour of a more established service from a company that acknowledges your content is your content?