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Houston Chronicle:

A few weeks ago, I attended a seminar my paper hosted on new technology for journalists. One suggestion was that reporters and editors use "cloud computing" such as Google Docs to share notes when collaborating on stories.

Google Docs is a free service that works much like a word processor, except the documents are stored online and can be accessed from anywhere. Because of its flexibility, it's becoming the Internet's Next Big Thing.

But the technological promise has a dark lining: once you put your data - or notes or story drafts - on a cloud, they're not really yours anymore.

Many companies consider data on their server to be theirs, even if it's data about someone else. Medical marketing companies, for example, routinely collect prescription drug data from pharmacies and sell it. It's not our data, it's merely data about us that may reveal our private medical conditions.

Google, which prides itself on not being evil, offers a few more protections in its online legal agreement that everyone accepts before using its products. The agreement states that users retain the copyright to content they post, submit or display using Google's services. But Google gets "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and nonexclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute" any of the content.

What's more, Google can make that content available to any companies or organizations it chooses.

"Most people do not pay any attention to what the terms of use are, but courts all over the world enforce those terms of use," said Peter Vogel, an attorney with Gardere Wynne Sewell in Dallas who teaches a course at Southern Methodist University on the law and e-commerce.

Google's legal waiver, which is the same for all its services, sparked a flurry of worried blog posts this week after it was applied to the new Web browser, Chrome.

Depending how you read it, it meant that Google could help itself to anything posted or viewed with Chrome. Google deleted the nonexclusive license provision for the browser but left it in place for its other services.

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Giving up possession
So the problem remains: What you put in cloud services such as Docs and Gmail, Google's free Web-based e-mail, isn't really yours anymore.

Google doesn't make money by giving us gigantic e-mail accounts. Its profit comes in part from selling ads tied to the content of messages sent with those accounts. In other words, it's sifting through our messages, looking for sales leads.

And it's not just Google.

"When one uses an online service - Google, Yahoo, AOL - there's a click agreement that nobody ever reads. Somewhere embedded in the agreement you waive all sorts of ownership issues," Vogel said.

I asked Vogel if lawyers use Gmail. Many, he said, use it only for general communications, because the Google legal agreement could be viewed as a waiver of attorney-client privilege. The courts might view simply sending a message via Gmail as public disclosure.

It's easy to see why cloud computing is catching on. For sheer convenience, it's hard to beat. During the trial of fallen Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, I used Gmail as a data storage vault for trial transcripts. I needed a program that could handle large files and that could be easily accessed by my laptop in the courthouse or my computers at home and in the newsroom.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/steffy/5984591.html

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