Vultr revises TOS after Reddit post claims it asserted perpetual rights to all user data

Cloud provider Vultr said a Reddit post claiming the company has asserted perpetual commercial rights over all user content—and speculating it intended to mine it for AI training—has no basis in reality.

Kevin Cochrane, Vultr’s chief marketing officer, told IT Brew that “under no circumstances” would Vultr leverage user data to train AI platforms: “It’s antithetical to…our ethos and our entire posture in the industry.”

A post in late March on the r/selfhosted subreddit claimed a recent update to Vultr’s terms of service (TOS) “requires its customers to fork over rights to our apps/software/data/anything hosted on the Vultr cloud platform.” It cited a section of the TOS where Vultr asserted a “non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license” to use, adapt, distribute, and commercialize user content “for purposes of providing the Services to you.”

The post remains up, with 1,600 upvotes.

Cochrane told IT Brew the language was present in Vultr’s TOS well before the latest update and referred only to publicly available content shared on communications platforms run by the company, such as user forums.

While the TOS was in fact updated shortly before the Reddit post, it was only to notify its customers that it would start deleting dormant accounts, according to the company. The seemingly expansive language does not reflect Vultr’s actual business practices, Cochrane said.

“I can’t speak to any other cloud provider,” Cochrane told IT Brew. “What we do specifically is adhere to the strictest requirements around data residency, data privacy, data sovereignty. What we don’t do is ever move your data or utilize your data in any way, shape, or form.”

Cochrane said Vultr no longer hosts community content, and promptly removed the provision after hearing customer concerns. It would have taken far longer to strip the section if it had actually been relevant to Vultr’s business, he added, and such sweeping terms could have threatened its compliance with laws like the EU’s GDPR.

As to why Vultr’s TOS suddenly became the center of a controversy, Cochrane said he guessed the Reddit post drew so many upvotes because Vultr’s profile has risen lately. For example, its AI/ML stack was the subject of recent coverage in Techzine, and the company signed a deal last year with Nvidia to acquire scarce Grace Hopper AI training chips.

If there’s a lesson to be learned, he added, it’s that TOS updates are “always a good opportunity to look at the whole terms of service and see if there’s anything in it that is no longer needed…that might lack specificity or clarity, that might cause confusion for someone who’s reading it for the first time.”