Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

keyt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 256 posts

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#221

Post by minikites »

Nasrudith wrote: post #196
minikites wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveill... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/19/federal... By providing ML training data, you're indirectly supporting the consolidation of power in the hands of the few who have the ability to surveil everyone and the physical might to enforce their will.

My urine like everyone else's contains potassium and can be used to create gunpowder - does this mean I am enabling terrorists to blow people up every time I take a leak?

If you and millions of other people captured, packaged, and transmitted that urine to a central urine clearinghouse (similar to how Google Photos works), then yes. Innocuous activities can easily be made dangerous when those activities are centralized and scaled up to a level involving/affecting hundreds of millions of people.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#222

Post by atomi »

nomad543 wrote: post #132

It's not about entitlement, it's not about wanting something for free as some other replies are trying to justify this kind of practice. It's about how offering something for free destroys genuine competition. Once the competition is destroyed, users will have no other option but to pay the price Google is asking. Users can't search for a better price or better service because there is no other competing business tha…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#223

Post by Kihashi »

JorgeGT wrote: post #30
jonplackett wrote: post #18

If you have to start paying for photo storage, you may as well move them somewhere with better privacy.

I'm giving Amazon Photos a try, since they offer unlimited high quality storage with Prime. I will appreciate if someone shares their opinion about this service.

I've been using it for a few weeks already. tldr: It's slightly worse than Google photos in most respects and quite a bit worse for albums.

* The AI is fine, although not as good as Google's.

* Albums are far less featureful. The shared link doesn't even show the album title. You can't add text or locations like you can on Gphotos. This makes trip albums less good IMO.

* Scrolling and UI seem faster, although I have far fewer photos.

* Desktop upload is nice for people who have non-smartphone cameras

* Albums list can be sorted by Date Created or Name. GPhotos default sort is by the date of the most recent photo. * Adding and removing from albums seems slower, but is also async, so /shrug

* Selecting multiple photos is much harder- Google allows a Press, hold, swipe gesture to select multiple photos. Amzn doesn't have that on the app. On web, they do have shift+Click, though.

* Different photo layouts is nice

* The shared photo screen is very aggressively in your face about advertising amazon photos. GPhotos has no ads.

* AFAICT, Amzn does not share the accounts/names of signed-in people who access shared content. Gphotos leaks this info to anyone who views the shared content. It's one of my main problems with GPhotos.

I have not really tested the "Groups" feature (which seems to be the equivalent of shared albums).

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#224

Post by blunte »

abraham wrote: post #28
blunte wrote: post #12

Is there yet any effective cloud to cloud migration tool or service? I don't mean cloud to PC back to different cloud ...

The Data Transfer Project is working on this although I believe it's still fairly early stage. https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17589246/data-transfer-pr... *I work at Google but not on this

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Somehow I had never heard of it - https://datatransferproject.dev/updates

There does seem to be some activity, although it also seems to be slowing a bit... https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/graphs/code-...

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#225

Post by ralfd »

ruph123 wrote: post #54

Can we talk about alternatives? I am not a Google Photos user but I struggle to find a good privacy-aware or self-hosting solution. Currently I am hosting my photos on my nextcloud instance. But the support from the iOS app for photos is really bad and there seems to be no good webdav photo viewer on iOS. So what about Piwigo [1] then? They allow self-hosting (does it run well on a raspi?) and have a pretty reasonabl…

If you are already on iOS I guess use Apples icloud?

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#226

Post by JoeAltmaier »

chrisseaton wrote: post #211
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey you're deliberately ignoring the cost per person, and the fact that raising prices while storage costs are falling dramatically is fiscally backward. That extremely uncharitable view of 'free' is getting in the way of understanding. So its a hundred million dollar data center, paid once. At a billion people served, its 10 cents per person per lifetime. So why $10 per month? Get it now?

> So its a hundred million dollar data center, paid once. In your mind, who pays for the hundred million dollar data centre?

Like I just said, the folks who use it. At 10 cents per person, that would about cover it. What's the question?

Anyway I've said all I have to say. Read my comments again if you want to understand. I'm out.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#227

Post by chrisseaton »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #226
chrisseaton wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So its a hundred million dollar data center, paid once. In your mind, who pays for the hundred million dollar data centre?

Like I just said, the folks who use it. At 10 cents per person, that would about cover it. What's the question? Anyway I've said all I have to say. Read my comments again if you want to understand. I'm out.

> Like I just said, the folks who use it. At 10 cents per person, that would about cover it. What's the question?

You repeatedly said 'Charging for storage is becoming silly. Its [sic] essentially free.'

Now you're saying you agree actually it requires hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and so people should be charged for it.

> Read my comments again if you want to understand.

But see how your comments contradict yourself? It should be free but people should pay for it. Which is it?

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#228

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

baq wrote: post #219
rockengineer84 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the privacy loss outcome that you are suggesting has happened as a result of photos being disclosed to algorithms?

Network effects, unintended side effects, operator incompetence, risk of information leak... GDPR should have me covered, but I won’t be able to remove myself from deep learning models they already have.

That is not true. Google retrains its models periodically. Removed data is not used for training models. Also I'm not sure that private user photos can even be used for training cross user models because I don't see how these photos could possibly be disclosed to raters, so there would be no ground truth.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#229

Post by nicoburns »

pfortuny wrote: post #24
nicoburns wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable. I pay £2.50/month for 200gb of storage which more than covers my lifetimes worth of photos so far (in full res with a fair few RAW photos in there too). And they're not deleting any photos that users already uploaded. I think Google deserve all the criticism they get for shutting down services. But this one seems to have been handled quite well.

Well it is like an infinite order of magnitude of a difference when PROMISED otherwise.

While technically true this also applies to literally any product marketed as unlimited, lifetime, or infinite. There are always restrictions because the world is finite and the resources of a single company even more limited. I would agree with you if you suggested that such marketing should be banned, but this is hardly a google-specific problem.

Re: Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

#230

Post by rq1 »

mehrdadn wrote: post #26
rq1 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marginal cost. You don't build one network per drive. I wouldn't personally say "essentially free" though.

The network was hardly the culprit in my explanation. How much is the cost of 4TB of georeplicated storage do you think? Surely you have to at least pay for the storage itself? So like $300-$400 at least if it's replicated 3-4x? And I haven't even hinted at offline backups and all kinds of other things.

I did not mean the network as the internet network, but as the whole replicated system including almost all the different layers.
Post reply on HN