Sunday, April 12, 2020

Turnitin's 'End-User' License Statement on their Privacy and Security web page (Buried 7,376 words down the page)


Unless otherwise indicated in this Site, including our Privacy Policy or in connection with one of our services, any communications or material of any kind that you e-mail, post, or transmit through the Site (excluding personally identifiable information of students and any papers submitted to the Site), including, questions, comments, suggestions, and other data and information (your "Communications") will be treated as non-confidential and non-proprietary. You grant Turnitin a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable license to reproduce, transmit, display, disclose, and otherwise use your Communications on the Site or elsewhere for our business purposes. We are free to use any ideas, concepts, techniques, know-how in your Communications for any purpose, including, but not limited to, the development and use of products and services based on the Communications.


So does this mean that Turnitin has given themselves a license to commit Plagiarism? Does this mean they are monitoring and filtering your communications? Can you imagine if Google had the above Turnitin statement in their legalese for the use of their email? Maybe this is why someone paid $1.7 billion for Turnitin? There are so many questions that these statements raise in my mind; or am I simply howling at the moon again?

Do you also want to know something else funny? Try to take any of the above legalize text from their web page and go to the same web page and try to search and find their 'Your license to us'. After attempting to do this on multiple strings of words, I found it simply does not work! And this is from a company that says they have the most sophisticated and largest text matching academic database in the world? Their own search tool can't even find similar text on a single in-house page!

Uhhhhhhhh.....not exactly a perfect match!


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Scopus/TCI1 (not SJR) Journal of Multidisciplinary in Social Sciences (JMSS)

  https://so03.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/sduhs/article/view/274241