Mozy: We guarantee nothing

Imagine putting your money into a bank that declared that it didn't promise the safety of your funds and might disappear at any time without giving you a chance to make a withdrawal. Would anyone put money into a bank like that? But information is money, and people entrust their data to services that say just that.

Seeing online commercials for Mozy, in which laptops are destroyed by riding mowers and falling stoves, I decided to check their terms of service to see if they're any better than other data storage services in the terms they offer. They aren't. (I've linked to the terms for the "pro" version of their service, where such issues are more important, but there isn't any significant difference from the "home" version on the issues discussed here.)

There's a one-way indemnification agreement; you agree to indemnify them, but they don't owe you a thing if their lawn mower runs over your files. They can drop the service without notice. They can change the agreement simply by posting the changes on their website, and you have 15 days to accept the changes or drop your account. They don't have to actually tell you.

Their privacy policy disclaims any warranty of privacy for your information:

Decho uses industry standard security measures to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control. Although we make good faith efforts to store the information collected by Decho in a secure operating environment that is not available to the public, Decho cannot guarantee complete security. Further, while we take reasonable steps to ensure the integrity and security of our network and systems, we cannot guarantee that our security measures will prevent third-party "crackers" from obtaining this information.

In other areas of business, companies will offer guarantees against failure. Snowblower companies have been known to offer rebates if it doesn't snow very much in a given winter. But when you use Mozy, your confidential business records might be snatched away, and they aren't liable for a thing. Naturally, their clever ads don't tell you this.

What's sad is that Mozy isn't unusually bad; this is all standard business practice. What's sadder is that people accept it.