The recent launch of Amazon Cloud Drive was big news in the IT world. The new service stores anything digital in the cloud so you can get to it anywhere you have an Internet capable device. It's free and you get 5 GB of free storage. The service connects with Amazon Cloud Player, a cloud-based music player that can be used on a computer or an Android tablet equipped with the Amazon mp3 App. But as ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols observed, "It's just too bad that you have to give up all privacy to use it."

The bulk of the press stories that I read on the new Amazon Cloud Drive service like the one by the New York Times focused on the fact that the service is a brilliant cloud business move against Apple iTunes to give people a single central storage locker primarily for their digital music files so that they're not scattered on different devices in different places. Amazon Cloud Drive coupled with Amazon Cloud Player is a powerful combination which is free to try out and then if you buy just one mp3 album from Amazon (US only for now) you get 20 GB of storage for a year at no additional cost. Beyond that online storage costs a reasonable $1 per gigabyte per year. The service stores anything digital, although it's geared mostly to music storage. The service competes with Apple iDisk, Microsoft SkyDrive, and Google Docs storage services. There is an additional cost, however.

In previous GreenTech pieces we've talked about concerns that nonprofits, NGOs, and libraries have about the security and privacy of their data stored in the cloud. Even though the cloud certainly has a lot of green benefits, are they worth the risk? Amazon has just given us a perfect lesson on what to watch out for. In the Amazon Cloud Drive Terms of Use, you can find the following little paragraph:

5.2 Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use, and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law.

To quote ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols again:

Wow. Amazon can do pretty much anything they want with your files like let the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) inspect your music files for any signs that you haven't paid full price for them. You remember the RIAA; they're the ones who want $75-trillion from LimeWire for allowing 11,000 songs to be illegally shared... Nice try Amazon, but you'll excuse me if I don't give you the right to access, retain, use, and disclose my account information and my files.

Now that we have this great new blog interface that allows you to sign in and comment, I'd very much welcome more examples of good cloud terms of use and also bad ones like this.