Terms of Service.

Questions sometimes arise about the rights of websites that host data.  Questioning the terms of service and reading carefully about your rights is very important when signing up for accounts with websites.  The careful review of the terms becomes even more important when a site might be holding data provided by students.
The U.S. federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) prohibits disclosing confidential information about students to third parties without their or their families' permission.  The use of the website Turnitin to clear student papers of plagiarism issues is a good example of possible conflict with FERPA.  Because Turnitin is a private company that holds all submissions and sells the information it receives, the use of this site may create a violation of FERPA for educators requiring its use.  Several challenges have been made regarding this possibility. 

Another concern might be the the terms of use condition that states that all content is owned by Turnitin and the parent site.
Lets imagine that a teacher were to ask a student to write a pro Marx paper and submit the paper through Turnitin and the student accepted the terms(it is not necessary for a student to accept terms to comply with teacher requirements) of Turnitin upon submission.  I would worry that if that student were to become a prominent politician, or the equivalent, their paper might find its way into the light of day.

The following is an except from Dropbox's terms.

"Dropbox does not claim any ownership rights in Your Files. You acknowledge that Dropbox does not have any obligation to monitor the Files or User Posts that are uploaded, posted, submitted, linked to or otherwise transmitted using the Site or Services, for any purpose and, as a result, is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, appropriateness, legality or applicability of the Files or anything said, depicted or written by users in their User Posts, including without limitation, any information obtained by using the Site or Services." 

These seem to be reasonable conditions, (if we can put aside that the privacy statement is not part of the agreement a student agrees to in the terms in Tunitin's case) but what would happen if Dropbox were purchased by a Chinese company?  What would happen if Turnitin were purchased by a Chinese company.  Would the copyrights that apply now be carried over to the new owner?  Would there be provisions written into the sale that could undo the previous conditions? Copyright understanding in China differs from our own because of a "Chinese tradition of sharing with one another, taking from others and the public without any sense of guilt, and disfavoring criminal litigation of copyright infringement as a result of the Confucian pursuit of social harmony(Tian, 2008)."