Lisa Vaas reports:
When Snapchat released a new app update last week, it came with a new privacy policy and new terms of service that left some users irked.
By agreeing with the company’s new terms of service, users have been dismayed to find that they’re now granting Snapchat “a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license” to:
…host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, create derivative works from, publicly perform, broadcast, distribute, syndicate, promote, exhibit, and publicly display that content in any form and in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).
This is what happens when people who haven’t been reading privacy policies all along suddenly read one: they think there’s something new or different – and evil.
But as Vaas notes:
It sounds like the new policies aren’t all that different from Snapchat’s old policies, at any rate: the company says the main reasons it rewrote the policies aren’t to give it a perpetual license to grab user content (unless it hasn’t been marked as private, so it might be a good time to check your privacy settings).
Rather, it was to make the policy easy to understand, in plain language that reads like the way that people actually talk.
Read more on NakedSecurity.
Mike Masnick is even clearer over on TechDirt, in Stop Freaking Out About Snapchat’s Terms Of Service; You Read It Wrong, where he points out that the terms are no different than what most other companies incorporate.
But as some commenters point out under that article, the fact that everyone does it does not really mean that we should not be concerned about what all of these companies are doing.