321–330 of 692 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Startup idea: SaaS portal to trigger FBI raid on RAID disks, acting as a free replicated permanent archival storage. Retrieving the data is out of scope of the MVP.
Reminds me of the unlimited write-only cloud storage service (an April fools joke, maybe?) from a few years ago.
> plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers [...] phased out [...] since he’s using too much storage, they’re going to delete his entire account in seven days (later this week).
First, an enterprise service provider who disrupts your operations in any way should probably be penalized, such as when evaluating future spending.
But an enterprise service provider who gives you seven days before they willfully delete your data... I guess you'd activate the lawyers immediately, to give the incompetent provider's bureaucracy enough time to halt the deletion... before it gets dramatically more expensive for both companies.
(And in parallel, throw money at the problem of racing to migrate to a different vendor, or at least get backups. You can try to recover the cost from the incompetent 'enterprise' vendor later.)
That said (and also acknowledging the HN memes that Google doesn't do customer service, and that Google will probably shut down most services of theirs upon which you might depend)... there's an obvious pattern in the 3 examples that the article gave.
In each example, the account had come under US law enforcement scrutiny. HN has heard other anecdata, but someone reading only this article would reasonably suspect that law enforcement action was a factor: maybe the company simply doesn't want to deal with that headache, either specifically or as a general policy; or it's conceivable that in some cases they might be asked to cripple/disrupt a user. Neither would be great, for a massive sometimes-monopoly for often crucial services, in a country with a legal standard of innocent unless&until proven guilty.
There are some interesting questions around those few examples of how customers under LE scrutiny are treated, but also questions around the various other examples HN hears of from time to time. And the article using only examples of the former might make the reader not as sympathetic as they should be, to a more general problem.
(Though occasionally some of the latter "Dear HN, company ___ cut me off!" examples sound like they could conceivably belong to the former category, without the complainer mentioning that factor. Even when a company makes it clear they're too big to care about a small percentage of users/customers, that's not necessarily the only reason a particular one gets stomped.)
I'm no great defender of Google but point some fallacies the article pushes: "regarding a woman losing her entire Google account after one of her 7 year old sons, messing around with a camera and uploading the videos to YouTube, published a video of himself naked. For obvious reasons, that’s a problem" If a 7 year old found a parent's gun, walked into the street and shot a neighbor to death accidentally; the parent i…
What if I failed to make cloud storage payments due to sickness or credit card being denied/whatever .. how long will they keep stuff before just deleting it?
This is just another possible cloud failure mode - the unreachable/unreasonable cloud provider just deciding to delete your account due to some error on their part.
So, it's multiple hard drives for me. I guess I should really put one in a fire-proof safe or something ... It really would be convenient to be able to trust Google/whoever with them!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, let's blame the victim here!
I mean 237 TB of data is an excessive amount of data. The 'victim' here clearly knows they are taking advantage of a situation. Google is in the wrong on their response but, come on, let's be reasonable human beings and stop saying 'victim blaming'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably it means they want to compress and dedupe and you cannot compress data after it has been encrypted.
Wait what? I'm a confessed ignoramus but this does not make sense to me. Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it. (Maybe not as well as unencrypted text, but still.)
People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. I've spent years as a consultant, and several more in the startup world, and I'd rather host all my content in us-east-1 than rely on google. * I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error, * I've seen people who use Google for advertising pay thousands of dollars and…
Just to be put the record straight: Google is an advertising company with hobbies. And like for many of us hobbies change over time, so do Google's hobbies. There's somewhere a website with all the products killed by Google for various reasons, some even after a few months.
This should be Google's mission, purpose, values and tagline.
The title is wrong. He had the option of paying for the space at least for the time that it takes him to download and archive the data himself.
Just buy 48 seats of Google Workspace Business Plus to get 240 TB pooled storage.
237 TB is a lot of storage, 864 USD/month is actually pretty cheap to store it all in the cloud. For comparizon, Backblaze B2 costs 6 USD/TB which works out to 1422 USD/month.
As much as I despise Google, this is simply a case of RTFM.
People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. I've spent years as a consultant, and several more in the startup world, and I'd rather host all my content in us-east-1 than rely on google. * I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error, * I've seen people who use Google for advertising pay thousands of dollars and…
> People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. Normally the response to this is, yes, it sucks, but you're not paying Google to host your data. However, it looks like this journalist did pay Google to host his data. So this immediately puts it in a worse category.
Funny, because they never seen to have problems hosting the advertising/surveillance data they collect on me. They never went "sorry we can't track you any more for free, will you type in you card number so we can keep surveilling you?"