• Read Write Web, Thursday, September 4, 2008 11:32 AM

It wasn't long before privacy hawks started to scrutinize Google's Terms of Service agreement for Chrome, the company's new Web browser. Read Write Web's Marshall Kirkpatrick and many others pointed out that Chrome's terms included a section giving the search giant "a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services." Said Kirkpatrick: "That seems pretty extreme for a browser, doesn't it?"

Soon thereafter, Google engineer Matt Cutts responded on his blog that something was wrong with Chrome's TOS. He asked Google's lawyers to react to Kirkpatrick's post, and this is what Rebecca Wad, Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome, said: "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. We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome."

Well, that's a relief, but some might say it was pretty shoddy of Google to assume that the same TOS can simply be cut and pasted from one product to the next. This one apparently comes from Google Docs circa 2007.

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