The much-anticipated, somewhat anticlimactic launch of Google Drive has finally landed on the digital shores amid the personal cloud market. Like every other cloud-storage service available to individuals such as Dropbox, Box.net, Skydrive, and similar it comes with a privacy policy and a terms of service that has raised some eyebrows about how their data might be treated in the personal cloud.

We’ve already seen these concerns before crop up when the FTC made a brief foray towards investigating Dropbox’s practices and then the cloud-storage service modified its Terms of Service. Much of the problems that people have had with the Terms of Service of personal cloud services is that they contain language that allows them to store, translate, display, and transform that data.

Leigh Beadon from TechDirt argues that none of these are special, and the Google Drive Terms of Service elements people find problematic come out of Google’s own global privacy policy,

I hate to break it to the panicking masses, but Google is not planning on turning your spreadsheets into a touring art exhibit. A broad license like this is necessary to allow Google to operate such a service, permitting them to move the data around freely on their many servers all over the world, and display it to you (or the people you share it with) through a variety of devices and interfaces. The nightmare-labyrinth of international copyright law means that the most Google could do without such a clause is accept your data then immediately delete it—and even then someone would probably try to claim they made five unauthorized copies en route to the trash bin.

As we’ve seen with both Dropbox and Box.net, amid other cloud-storage services, this sort of language is common and seeks to ameliorate problems that might arise form storing intellectual property and private data for people.

Personal Cloud Competition and Security

The second problem that arises is that personal cloud storage services are not developed around security as much as permitting people to share their data and collaborate. Many services offer a minimum level of encryption and authentication in order to provide a suitable lock to keep out opportunistic hackers; but they’re not engaged in a holistic approach to security that many enterprise users or those who want to share proprietary data might want.

Mihir Nanavati, vice president of Product Management and User Experience of YouSendIt spoke to SiliconANGLE about security and privacy when sharing data with personal cloud services, especially for small and large businesses. Alongside other personal cloud offerings, YouSendIt is in direct competition with Google Drive, so they’re looking for a way to differentiate themselves.

“In an environment where everyone is pushing cloud storage and drives, people just need to just get work done. They don’t need another link, another URL, another new interface, another shared drive to locate their information,” says Nanavati.

YouSendIt uses a combination of e-mail and secure servers to allow people to collaborate and transfer information. It’s an interesting sort of hybrid-cloud setup that engages communication to push notification of the stored files and let collaborators pick up the information from YouSendIt’s secure cloud storage—and importantly uses SSL connections to transfer data from server to clients.

Nanavati adds, “With 90 percent of business communication still happening over e-mail, people want to share their critical business documents when they need to and as they need to outside their firewall with trusted partners, customers and vendors without having to think about a new way to do business.”