Ownership in the cloud

An interesting read in the Guardian yesterday, concerning who exactly owns the content that users upload into cloud services such as Instagram.  This is a thorny old issue but is prompted by the changes to the Terms and Conditions of the use of Instagram, which kick in on January 13th.   From then on, the use of Instagram is conditional upon you being required to share your username, likeness and photos - and for them to be used for advertising purposes without you receiving any form of reimbursement.  This would certainly impact upon professional and semi-professional photographers, who might otherwise make some decent money from selling their photos online - if they now upload these photographs into Instagram then they could lose all rights to these.  To which one could counter - well, don't do it then.  Keep your own personal or commercial photographs - or any kind of data - away from such cloud services.  But that does not really address the issue, since a great many people are using cloud computing services and entrusting these services with potentially sensitive data.  My school has - in no small part because of me - committed to using google apps for all staff and students.  This includes gmail and google docs, plus google calendar.  There are now many hundreds of thousands of documents that we have entrusted to google to backup, restore and generally look after for us.  In google's case, they do not own the data that I have put into their services, but they do reserve the right to do whatever they like with it.  The lesson there being - if you want to use a free cloud service, be sure to know what you are signing up for.