Wetransfer to use your files to train its AI

Yeah, so, update on the Wetransfer CGU

It’s now gonna peek at your files to train it’s AI (machine learning, sorry)
article 6.3 :slight_smile:

You hereby grant us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable license to use your Content for the purposes of operating, developing, commercializing, and improving the Service or new technologies or services, including to improve performance of machine learning models that enhance our content moderation process


so, here are a couple alternatives :

it’s french, up to 2gb for free.
up to 20gb for free - but you’re not in the express line. the upload is longer.
available 7 days.

it’s swiss. up to 50gb for free. up to 30 days.

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Intresting, I’m in the UK and got the “We are updating our bla bla bla” email but 6.3 is different to the above and searching for either ‘machine’ or ‘learning’ returns no results.
Here’s what 6.3 says for me:

6.3. License to WeTransfer. In order to allow us to operate, provide you with, and improve the Service and our technologies, we must obtain from you certain rights related to Content that is covered by intellectual property rights. You hereby grant us a royalty-free license to use your Content for the purposes of operating, developing, and improving the Service, all in accordance with our Privacy & Cookie Policy.

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that’s odd. maybe in the UK / US it’s included in the “improving the service”, while in europe with RGPD they need to add it ?

either way, it’s unlikely that a big internet company would do it on some but not other, not unless a final decision from a court of justice. I’ve seen quite a lot of panic since this morning, medias, companies that use it to transfer documents “safely”. and are now looking for alternatives.

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Thanks for brining this up and thanks for also make alternative recommendations. As a file sharing company the least you want them to do is go snooping through the documents you are trying to send.

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It’s a fine point about an otherwise offensive policy, but SketchUp files are a proprietary binary format. It is not possible for WeTransfer or any other AI to learn anything beyond the fact that people are sending skp files without a serious violation of trade secrets.

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It seems to be quite a big privacy breach. I wonder what other cloud services have in their TOSs. Many corporates have started using OneDrive to store all or large parts of their data instead of local servers.

I know companies that just use vanilla windows 11 with the automated compression + onedrive synchronisation.

and looking at all the broken files on PC, I guess they’re are many more…

technically they’re an unecrypted zip file, so reading it’s content is like any other zip file - it is easy.

ditto for layout files

reading and indexing “compressed” files is trivial and likely even your desktop search does it (unless you specifically turn it off).

and since you don’t own most of the software (OS, app, internet app etc – it’s only been “granted a license to use it” to you if you read the T&Cs) if you continue to use the version to which they have changed the terms, then you have effectively agreed to the terms.

The most obvious alternative is to have a repository or cde solution that is already part of the software you are using…
Not only can you control who has access and for how long and which version etc. it also provides a convenient way to view the files simultaneously, make markups/revision clouds etc. etc.
Here is a link:

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