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Amazon Launches Cloud-Based Storage Service and Music Player

"Our Right to Access Your Files" Amazon's Terms Of Use

Yo! check out this key clause to Amazon's Terms Of Use >

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.

WTF ???!!!
 
Going further on infancy stage of cloud as far as main stream consumers are concerned -- Only way they can drive people to it right now would be if it was all free.

Nobody in right mind would pay money to store their own files somewhere else which they already have on their computer.

Cloud storage can work for things that people do not own: software that they rent, movies and such.

Storing music on cloud is just simply stupid idea as it doesn't take up lot of space on your device and music is something you want to listen over and over again if it's your favorite(do you really want to having to connect to internet to get your fav music?)
 
tatonka said:
Come on Apple you can do it ..

Having bought a good chunk of my media library of iTunes I would love to back that up into the cloud .. wirelessly syncing my phone would be heaven.

Hopeing Apple has something good up their sleeves.

T.
Click to expand...

LOL..yeah Windows Phone beat them to the wireless syncing..what a joke Apple!
 
butterass said:
Yo! check out this key clause to Amazon's Terms Of Use >

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.

WTF ???!!!
Click to expand...

Wonderful, in that Files are encouraged to include photos, documents, etc. :mad:

"... access, retain, use and disclose ... as we determine is necessary ..."

No thanks.
 
Great move by amazon to bring out a service that competes legitimates with Apple in this space. In fact, on paper at least it destroys it.

Really, really stupid move to not let iOS devices connect. that is an idiot move.
 
Eolian said:
Wonderful, in that Files are encouraged to include photos, documents, etc. :mad:

"... access, retain, use and disclose ... as we determine is necessary ..."

No thanks.
Click to expand...

Oh noes! :( (Isn't this standard legal mumbo jumbo?) :confused:

Access to Your Account and Content
You acknowledge and agree that Apple may access, use, preserve and/or disclose your account information and Content if legally required to do so or if we have a good faith belief that such access, use, disclosure, or preservation is reasonably necessary to: (a) comply with legal process or request; (b) enforce these TOS, including investigation of any potential violation thereof; (c) detect, prevent or otherwise address security, fraud or technical issues; or (d) protect the rights, property or safety of Apple, its users or the public as required or pemitted by law.
Click to expand...

http://www.apple.com/legal/mobileme/en/terms.html
 
Who's fault is it there's no iOS option (yet)?

Am I the only one who thinks that the fact that you can't use this service on iOS has more to do with Apple than it does with Amazon? (Remember lala.com?)
 
butterass said:
Yo! check out this key clause to Amazon's Terms Of Use >

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.

WTF ???!!!
Click to expand...

Thank you for digging that out. Obviously no one should ever use this. Uploading your stuff to their servers = unlimited access by them to your stuff.

Great. No thanks, Amazon. Not that I trust Apple more than you (I don't), but you make it clear that you likely will access people's documents, files, photos, audio.

You'll get the dumb squad to sign up for your crap. They always come out whenever there is something bad to sign up for.
 
Not enough for my collection.

And never felt like I had to download music at work and anywhere else.

Maybe I'm out of touch, but ...

I do like the idea of not having to back stuff up in case I lose it to a hard drive crash.

5gb ain't enough to cover my collection however.
 
ChazUK said:
Access to Your Account and Content
You acknowledge and agree that Apple may access, use, preserve and/or disclose your account information and Content if legally required to do so or if we have a good faith belief that such access, use, disclosure, or preservation is reasonably necessary to: (a) comply with legal process or request; (b) enforce these TOS, including investigation of any potential violation thereof; (c) detect, prevent or otherwise address security, fraud or technical issues; or (d) protect the rights, property or safety of Apple, its users or the public as required or pemitted by law.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

That reads quite a bit different from Amazon's "... or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service ..."
 
Eolian said:
That reads quite a bit different from Amazon's "... or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service ..."
Click to expand...

Yes amazons is more transparent and to the point. Apples is more vague. Ill take transparent over vague "in my interpretation" any day.
 
Eolian said:
That reads quite a bit different from Amazon's "... or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service ..."
Click to expand...

I'm not convinced it's as dire as people are making it out to be. Either way, both Apple and Amazon have full rights to access users files on both services for various reasons.

What are your fears on the Amazon terms that don't exist on the MobileMe ones? (Perhaps I'm being dense so some clarification is in need!) :D
 
Cloud Services and Data Caps

I've seen comments touch this but I'll put in my 2 cents.

More and more cloud services coming to consumers offering GB's a data for fre or a nominal price. More and more ISPs are capping data bandwidth at 250GB r less. Will we not reach a point where we will not have access to our files due to a cap? Don't cloud providers have it in their interest to abolish caps if they want our information on our servers?

The world is becoming more connected but ISPs are closing down cloud innovation with arbitrary caps. I find it better just to buy a huge HDD that I can put on the shelf if I cannot access my data. Case in point, I will eventually have 250GB on Carbonite. If I need to do a one time restore, it will cause me to use all of my bandwidth.
 
jcgarza said:
Am I the only one who thinks that the fact that you can't use this service on iOS has more to do with Apple than it does with Amazon? (Remember lala.com?)
Click to expand...

no you're not the only one. for android you need an app right? maybe it just doesn't work well on mobile browsers? i can actually play the music i purchased on amazon on my iphone through safari using the cloud player, but the download/upload music links don't work and you do get a message that says browser not supported but it still kinda works, but you can't really download music on to an iphone anyway unless through itunes right? so in that case amazon would HAVE to make an iphone app to have it work.. that would require apple approving one and amazon giving them 30%. don't see how amazon's the bad guy here.
 
Weird. There are more positive votes than negative Amazon's cloud-based service. When there was talk of Apple doing it there were more negative votes than positive votes.
 
jvmxtra said:
I agree w/ this. Everyone has internet at home and everyone who is so into media, already has a media server. Stuff like air video and streamtome works just fine for streaming media from anywhere internet is available.

People who care so much about accessing media enough to take their time to upload their stuff to cloud can certainly do same at their own house. Is this really for people who don't have internet at home or can't afford nas at home?

Seriously, what is the point of all this? Only time cloud storage works is for group collaboration where people need to share things from everywhere. For personal stuff, personal computer works the best w/ decent internet.
Click to expand...

Not everyone has decent internet at home, you know. And those that do might not keep a computer on 24/7. I know that I'm in that situation. Leaving my MacPro on and not asleep 24/7 adds about 400-500 dollars a year to my electrical costs.

I could get the 500GB paid amazon cloud storage account for that much!
 
Glad they have moved forward with it and who cares if they might have copied off an Apple rumor. I am looking forward to Apple going with their cloud service if it integrates with the current ipod interface. Like I can just pick cloud library or local. Or even better just list them all together with an option to not list suspected duplicates. The fact Amazon was able to release this so effort free shows how much future planning they have done compared to Apple. Also I am not so big on paying the energy bill to keep my desktop on 24/7 so I can access my files not to mention I have DSL so my upload speeds are good enough for audio but I could not stream video without a huge decrease in quality.
 
ChazUK said:
I'm not convinced it's as dire as people are making it out to be. Either way, both Apple and Amazon have full rights to access users files on both services for various reasons.

What are your fears on the Amazon terms that don't exist on the MobileMe ones? (Perhaps I'm being dense so some clarification is in need!) :D
Click to expand...
Anyone storing remotely anywhere should be aware that they've signed away some rights, of course. FWIW I don't use MobilMe for storage, or for anything else presently.

Someday it would be nice to be able to wirelessly sync my devices through it for free, but that's a different topic :p

What I see is Amazon being explicit here in that they can retain, use and disclose your data in any way they see fit. Period. Apple at least spells out that their use etc is directly related to law enforcement, TOS violations, security/fraud/technical issues, and protection of rights and property.

Do you see this differently?
 
milbournosphere said:
I don't trust corporate clouds, especially with a service that Sony is clearly gunning for legally.

I suggest Subsonic. It streams music from your Mac or PC to your iPhone, Android phone, or Win7 phone. It also allows you to stream from another computer via a web browser. And it's free! Own your data, create your own cloud.

http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp
Click to expand...

This is exactly what im talking about, why pay for cloud storage when you already have all you need to make your own?
 
Where this is leading...

...obviously, is the rollout of a "Kindle Tablet" running Honeycomb.

The custom Amazon front end would have icons for:

Kindle Reading App (and Kindle Store)
Amazon Music Player (with cloud storage) and MP3 Store
Amazon Prime Streaming Video (and the Amazon Video Store)
Amazon Android App Store
Cloud Storage Manager
Some sort of Web Browser

And underneath that is Honeycomb. Maybe they throw in a free Amazon Prime subscription with purchase (free 2-day shipping on Amazon purchases).

Here would be Amazon leveraging all their strengths into a physical device that could seriously challenge the iPad in ways that no other vendor can, because it creates an Amazon "ecosystem" with the worlds biggest store for physical goods attached.

People like to shop.
 
Eolian said:
What I see is Amazon being explicit here in that they can retain, use and disclose your data in any way they see fit. Period.

Do you see this differently?
Click to expand...

Looking at what you've said there makes sense and I think I see it the same as you (it certainly looks like Amazon will have more "right" to access your data for less specific reasons).

Perhaps it's a bad judge of character but I do see Amazon along with Apple as top tier companies when it comes to privacy concerns so my concerns are dampened by their good reputations. :)

Hopefully some rogue element in Amazon doesn't abuse the levels of access they have.
 
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