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Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

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Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#361

Post by mardifoufs »

nox100 wrote: post #281
terminous wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> taking advantage No. 100% wrong. If you advertise and sell "unlimited" then you should deliver unlimited. If you don't build in acceptable use limits into the contract, then that's your fault, not the customer's.

I challenge you to go to any restaurant that has "unlimited refills", back up a tanker trunk and fill your truck. I don't think any court would enforce "unlimited" for that situation. I'm not sure this storage one is all that different

But restaurants explicitly ban doing that. Even all you can eat restaurants don't let you take out food. Google never hinted at having a maximum limit. Theres no reason to believe or expect that unlimited actually means some arbitrary limit that google just came up with after you signed up. Your analogy would've been better if the journo tried hosting a file share service using his drive account as a back end or something but that's not what happened

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#362

Post by charcircuit »

lolinder wrote: post #217
andrewmutz wrote: post #51

The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data" The facts of the article are even less inflammatory. The journalist uploaded 237.22 TB of video to his google drive when the "unlimited" plan existed. When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying fo…

> When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state. You make it sound like he could have chosen to keep paying Google under a different plan, but I can't find any way for him to pay Google to keep the data for him short of creating 100+ dummy "users" in his workspace to get their 2TB each (which I'm sure Google would totally be okay with) […

He already needed to have 5 users in his workspace to unlock unlimited storage.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#363

Post by freedomben »

Google deserves some hate here, but this problem is bigger than just them, and I think by being too narrowly focused on G we're missing a systemic problem. G is one of the worst offenders, but this is a cultural attitude/approach in most of tech. The idea is to acquire users by giving stuff away or making your service cheap, lock them in, then squeeze by ratcheting up the price. It's a playbook that has worked fantastically well and made a lot of people very rich, so it's not going to change overnight and/or without some pain.

I've started refusing business with these types of companies, and I tell them why. I'm sure none of it matters, but if I do it then I know that at least somebody is saying something.

An example: I would be one of the biggest buyer of Kindle books on the planet if they were DRM free. I'd still buy some things if I could use software to read it that wasn't invasively spying on me. It's nice that they make stuff cheaper by putting some of the data revenue into it (and even subsidizing it in some cases), but I'd much rather pay for something like Remarkable more but get a respectful product.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#364

Post by judge2020 »

racl101 wrote: post #346

I don't wanna victim blame, but I don't understand how people could put their entire body of work on a cloud service and not make the effort to get several external drives to have some redundancy. All my work is probably like 50GB, but I have it backed up on an external drive AND the cloud. It's like self preservation instinct is missing. 3rd party services are fallible, even when they don't make business decisions t…

Because storing 240TB is expensive even locally. From https://diskprices.com/, if he gets a good deal of $8/tb, it's going to cost $2,000 just for the storage of his data, and getting the data onto it would require a setup that can address and power 20 drives (assuming 12TB drives), unless they use a few USB HDD Sata adapters to archive it all.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#365

Post by backtoyoujim »

andrewmutz wrote: post #51

The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data" The facts of the article are even less inflammatory. The journalist uploaded 237.22 TB of video to his google drive when the "unlimited" plan existed. When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying fo…

I am not a fan of "some else figured out that they could overcharge people" as a moral lesson.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#366

Post by toastercat »

pdonis wrote: post #235
smhenderson wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That whole "you're not paying"'thing is really a straw man at this point too. When Google was young and eager to be a good netizen I'd have agreed with that and said it was all part of helping to make the web better. But they've been entrenched for years now, completely dominate so many aspects of the web and get plenty of value out of even their free users. Given their size and stranglehold on just about everything,…

Of course Google gets value out of free users--that's a huge piece of their business model. And of course if Google had actually kept to their original "don't be evil" model, they wouldn't routinely screw over users the way they do. However, as you note, they have been entrenched for years now, and it has been obvious for that same amount of time that they have long since dropped "don't be evil". So while it certainl…

The average non-tech savvy person doesn't really have an option than to get screwed over then. Assuming you have an Android phone, it's practically required to have a Google account; many apps just flat out do not work without Google Play Services or without signing in with your Gmail account.

Yes, I know about microG, Graphene, F-Droid and the like, but the average person is not going to flash their phone. They will inevitably hit a wall that says "you need to login with Google," create a Google account, and won't ask questions.

Just as an example, my mother-in-law couldn't find her contacts when she bought a new phone. Why? Because she was unknowingly saving her contacts to a Google account she forgot she made.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#367

Post by alentred »

smhenderson wrote: post #218
pdonis wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That whole "you're not paying"'thing is really a straw man at this point too. When Google was young and eager to be a good netizen I'd have agreed with that and said it was all part of helping to make the web better. But they've been entrenched for years now, completely dominate so many aspects of the web and get plenty of value out of even their free users. Given their size and stranglehold on just about everything,…

Good point. I have never considered this argument before, but I agree. In a healthy case, the sphere of responsibility (of a company, individual) should approximately match their sphere influence. And with a sphere of influence this large, this goes far beyond the "contract" between individual parties only.

In some cases this kind of relationship auto-regulates itself (e.g., taking a small vs large credit in a bank): at larger scale, both parties are invested into maintaining a good relationship. The problem in this case is, any individual investment into any relationship with Google is just a drop in the ocean.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#368

Post by BobaFloutist »

vertis wrote: post #128
tedivm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that but they actually provide real support. I once complained on Twitter that I was having trouble with an EKS issue, and the product manager for EKS reached out to me directly, put me in contact with one of their engineers, and then they discovered an issue and rolled out a fix for it that day. In a separate incident, I couldn't get GCP to read the verification data for a domain from their webmaster tools…

There was that time in 2013, that I leaked my AWS key and a "hacker" ran up a $3500 bill running Litecoin mining[0]. Not only was the support excellent and forgave the debt, Werner Vogel (AWS CTO) popped into the HN thread[1] and offered to help -- I got to email him and tell him his people were already on top of it. And yes, they have made their money back off me in the 10 years since (average $100-200 a month). [0]…

Would you mind sharing how (in broad terms) your key got leaked? I'm always interested in stories like that as a point of comparison to my own (not great) security practices just so I know how reasonable I'm being.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#369

Post by selectodude »

Nicksil wrote: post #109
E39M5S62 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a lot of money" and "a long time" are subjective.

>"a lot of money" and "a long time" are subjective. You've missed the point. It's the fact that this guy did pay for the services.

Google is wrong for ever offering unlimited storage. However if everybody is charging $20,000+ per year and Google is charging $1000, you gotta know that you’re living on borrowed time. Even backblaze, with their low margins and commodity hard drives charges $18k.

The concept of counterparty risk strikes again.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#370

Post by buttercraft »

boringg wrote: post #302
nox100 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I challenge you to go to any restaurant that has "unlimited refills", back up a tanker trunk and fill your truck. I don't think any court would enforce "unlimited" for that situation. I'm not sure this storage one is all that different

In fact all you can eat buffets ban people from showing up after they completely break the system.

All-you-can-eat is not the same as unlimited.
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