Terms & Conditions: Dailymotion protects your privacy better than YouTube

It’s sometimes easy to forget that the Web has video-sharing services not named YouTube. But Dailymotion has done its best to remind us of this fact. Based in Paris, France, Dailymotion serves in the neighborhood of 116 million unique visitors a month, making it the second most-used video hosting site on the Web, after YouTube and its 1.6 billion monthly uniques. That may be the reason Yahoo is reportedly in talks to purchase Dailymotion for around $200 million. We’ll let Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer work that one out. In the mean time, let’s take a look at what kind of company Dailymotion is, based on its terms of use and privacy policy.

Terms of service

Dailymotion’s terms of use are nothing spectacular – more or less the normal kind of legalese you’ll find most companies have. That said, they are a bit more straightforward that many such terms, without most of the doublespeak we so often encounter here at T&C. Let’s dive in.

Keep it to yourself

Dailymotion jumps right into perhaps the most important provision for users: intellectual property rights. Here, the company does not mince words: “Dailymotion does not own your content.” When you upload a video to the site, you are simply giving the company the right to deliver that video to other users – which is the whole point. Dailymotion only has the rights to display your content until you delete if from the site.

Too much information

As with any Web service that lets you broadcast whatever you wish, Dailymotion makes it clear that you are responsible for not sharing personal information to which you don’t want the entire world to have access. So don’t upload videos that reveal where you live, or even your real name. If you do, and something bad happens, that’s your fault, not Dailymotion’s.

Don’t like it? Don’t watch.

If you’ve ever actually read a terms of service (or other legally binding contract), you’ve probably seen portions that are written IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS LIKE IT’S SCREAMING AT YOU! And, in fact, it is: Lawyers put the most important stuff in all caps as an added protection against lawsuits, so that nobody can claim they tried to hide some key fact.

The “our liability” section of Dailymotion’s terms are so written. And they basically say, there may be stuff on Dailymotion that you don’t want to see. And if you see it, that’s not the company’s fault. So keep your complaints to yourself.

Forbidden zone

Dailymotion has an entirely separate page for “prohibited content,” which forbids users from uploading the following:

– child pornography;
– dangerous or illegal acts (including but not limited to incitement to violence, animal abuse or drug abuse);
– unlawful, obscene, defamatory or libelous material; or
– any sexually explicit content (including but not limited to images of rape, bestiality, intercourse, masturbation, sadistic or masochistic abuse, explicit depiction of male or female genitalia or pubic areas, pedophilia or necrophilia).

Of course, anything that violates intellectual property laws is also forbidden. (However, it’s not entirely clear how strongly the company enforces this.) Also, don’t take that “sexually explicit” thing too seriously – the site is rife with videos that contain nudity, but not full-on porn. Still, the company reserves the right to remove any content that subverts “accepted moral standards” or “otherwise promote(s) illegal or immoral activity.” Violating these rules “may result in Your Content being removed and/or your account being deactivated without prior notice.”

Privacy policy

As far as privacy goes, Dailymotion is actually pretty good. (Part of this may be due to far more strict privacy laws in Europe, where the company is based.) And it’s data collection is relatively limited – provided you sign up directly with the site, and not with Facebook. Don’t sign up with Facebook. Anywhere. Ever.

I’ll take that

The information Dailymotion collects about you is this: email address, date of birth, and IP address. That’s it. The company says it does not share this information with any third parties, which is more than you can say for many other websites and companies.

Oh, advertisers

While Dailymotion doesn’t share your data, it does have advertising (shocker!), which means third-party advertisers are collecting certain data about you directly by placing a cookie on your browser (which you can disallow in your browser’s settings). Fortunately, Dailymotion swears that all of this data is “anonymous” and does not contain any personally identifying information. If you want to opt out of this entirely, you can do so here.