Justice and competent authorities they ensure that companies do not exceed certain limits on their services. Many of them are related to problems of privacy, monopoly and unfair competition, among others. The task that countries or higher bodies such as the European Commission have is to detect, analyze and propose solutions to these problems. A few hours ago we learned that the Competition and Market Authority (AGCM) of Italy has started investigating various storage clouds: iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox. The purpose of the investigations is to respond to complaints from unfair business practices e breach of consumer rights.
iCloud, Google Drive and Dropbox: investigated by Italian authorities
The key objective of these investigations initiated by the Competition and Market Authority (AGCM) Italian is double. On the one hand, answer the complaints of unfair competition from many consumers and companies and, on the other hand, the possibility of the existence of abusive clauses in the current conditions of the contracts signed by users when they register and start a contract with the services.
There are three storage clouds under magnifying glass: Apple iCloud, Google Drive and Dropbox. Especially, Google and Apple are being investigated for information failures or inadequate indication in the presentation of the service. There are also causes around the collection and commercial use of data provided by the user. In addition, there could have been conditions where these services collected and used information without the consent of the user.
In addition, a research projects. exhaustive of the Terms and Conditions of each service. Confusion or lack of clarity may be key to the Italian authorities deciding to attack that pillar. These are the main conflicting points of the terms and conditions of the investigated services:
- Companies have the right to suspend the service at any time.
- The cloud service cannot be blamed for data loss.
- The companies reserve the right to modify the terms and conditions at any time.
- Companies ensure that contracts, terms and conditions in English take precedence over other languages, even if the user has not signed the contract in English.
We will finally see how this Italian investigation ends, which could spread to other regions or even reach higher areas of trade analysis in the European Union.