Calm down, WeTransfer isn’t laying claim to your files

Nobody bothers reading the Ts & Cs? Try telling that to WeTransfer, which has spent the past 24 hours putting out the flames after a new set of terms created uproar.

The company’s revised Ts & Cs certainly made it sound like they were trying to lay claim to the files customers shared on the service.

“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, in accordance with the Privacy & Cookie Policy,” the terms stated.

“Such license includes the right to reproduce, distribute, modify, prepare derivative works based upon, broadcast, communicate to the public, publicly display, and perform Content.”

The final kick in the teeth was that customers were informed that “you will not be entitled to compensation for any use of Content by us under these Terms”.

WeTransfer is a service for sending large files that are too big to share via email or other means. It’s often used by businesses, sometimes for sensitive documents such as contracts. Little wonder customers were left unimpressed when WeTransfer seemed to lay claim to anything they were sending.

WeTransfer climbdown

With the company’s new Ts & Cs being torched on social media, WeTransfer moved quickly to amend the terms and explain why it changed them in the first place.

One of the big concerns was that WeTransfer was bagging the rights to use customers’ content to train AI. However, in a statement on the WeTransfer website, the company claims “we don’t use machine learning or any form of AI to process content shared via WeTransfer”.

The company said it was exploring the possibility of using AI to “improve content moderation”, specifically to “prevent the distribution of illegal or harmful content on the WeTransfer platform”. The hastily revised terms now omit all mention of machine learning models.

The company is also bending over backwards to insist it’s not trying to claim ownership of customers’ files. “Your content is always your content,” the company states, pointing out that another clause in its terms specifies that you “own and retain all right, title, and interest, including all intellectual property rights, in and to the Content”.

Consequently, it’s rewritten the offending terms as follows:

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.

Ts & Cs overreach

This is by no means the first occasion when a company’s loosely worded Ts & Cs have plunged it into hot water with its customers.

Adobe ran into a similar controversy last year, when an update to its terms seemed to imply that it could train its AI models on customers’ content stored locally or in the cloud. Adobe eventually revised the terms to state explicitly that it “will not use your Local or Cloud Content to train generative AI”.

As far back as 2012, Instagram issued an apology after a revision of its privacy policy implied the company had the right to sell users’ photos to advertisers. “It is our mistake that this language is confusing,” the company’s chief executive admitted at the time, according to a BBC report.

And there, in a nutshell, is the problem with Ts & Cs. They are often mind-numbingly long, written in dense legalese and – crucially – often contain terms so broad and all-encompassing that customers rightly wonder what rights they are being asked to surrender.

Is there any hope of it changing? Not much. In the meantime, be glad that at least someone’s reading those ridiculous documents. And that the occasional social media furore helps to keep these companies honest.

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