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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

#541

Post by cxr »

chlorion wrote: post #440
garblegarble wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had ~6 months to download his data, not 7 days: they told him on the 11th of May 2023 (or thereabouts they gave him a 60 day period ending on the 10th of July 2023) that he had exceeded his quota. They should, of course, have given a clear timeline for deletion at that point, but does he seriously expect other people to believe he was naive enough to think Google would continue to store his data forever after they…

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The mendacity in your comment coupled with the glee you express in it is disturbing.

> Even for Google Podcasts which is being terminated, users who don't pay have gotten notifications for well over a year that the service was going to shutdown

Uh, no. It hasn't even been 3 months since the shutdown was announced—and I personally only learned about it a few days after the announcement by a chance conversation with someone who mentioned it in person. (This was thankfully well after I had already gotten what personal data of mine I could out of the app and migrated to another player precisely due to the lackadaisical approach user data handling by whomever is responsible for Google Podcasts. It was notable for being one of the Google services that doesn't make user data available through Google Takeout.)

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

#542

Post by PeterisP »

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…

All his off-cloud hardware was seized by the FBI.

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

#543

Post by sangnoir »

rcoveson wrote: post #510
sangnoir wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat. It's a poor analogy. There are cloud storage users in every order-of-magnitude bracket from 10^0 to 10^15 bytes used. S3 is not like Chuck-a-Rama. A businessperson that attempts to treat them like they are similar will be forced…

> The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat.

I'm not "sneaking" it in - I'm saying it outright. When Google (or anyone else competent in the art) is designing and provisioning a service, they have a numbers they use to estimate user resource-usage percentiles: unlike journalists, infra engineers don't have the luxury to pretend storage space is free or infinite.

When you win too much at a casino, or eat too much at a buffet, or stay too long at a McDonald's, or stay too long at the gas pump, they will all ask you to leave. There are common-sense limits to most services. Free-service tiers on internet services are not exempt. Extreme usage threatens the business model.

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

#544

Post by that_guy_iain »

flavius29663 wrote: post #405
that_guy_iain wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" You just expanded it. It's still basically the same. > It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that, so he now needs to find someone to bear the cost of storing hi…

So you're saying the morale of the story is: if your situation is not an edge case, you're fine with using google. We won't tell you ahead of time what is an edge case though, as google finds new ones all the time. Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.

>So you're saying the morale of the story is: if your situation is not an edge case, you're fine with using google. We won't tell you ahead of time what is an edge case though, as google finds new ones all the time.

No, the morale of my story is not to get wound up by massive edge cases that impact 1-2 people.

> Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.

That isn't an edge case thought, was it?

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

#545

Post by godelski »

nirvdrum wrote: post #450
resoluteteeth wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google response isn't correct but everyone here has there hands a bit dirty. Storing 237 Tb on an unlimited server - the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system and probably should have been ready for some kind of remedy. Google clearly made a mistake in offering an "unlimited plan" so it makes perfect sense that they're going to discontinue it, and offer 60 days before the data becomes read…

Perhaps it was a mistake, but offering unlimited was a competitive advantage. Others working with the economies of storage had limits or priced based on usage; having unlimited would be a great way to draw in customers. I'm highly skeptical of tech companies effectively price dumping, harming competition, and then coming out and saying "Oops, that wasn't sustainable. Here are the new terms." I'm of the mindset that i…

It's also naive to think a big tech company wouldn't be aware of power distributions (see Pareto) when offering anything unlimited. Which Google does continue to offer unlimited data on Google Fi, but throttles (even though they also discontinued the unlimited photo upload with Pixels and many times offers expansion of drive space but if you upgrade to a paid plan you don't get the additional storage, you just get get expanded to that size...)

I also very much agree that the monopolistic behavior you're mentioning is not a think we should just go accepting and even more, not be victim blaming. It feels really weird to me that people are blaming the reporter. You know, a 1.6 trillion dollar company vs well... nearly anyone else.

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

#546

Post by cesarb »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #395
DiskoHexyl wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encrypted data is highly random, and a compression ratio would be close to 1. So yeah- technically you can run a compression algorithm over it, but it won't help much

OK gotcha. Close to, but not exactly 1 because patterns appear even in randomness.

Yes, but the times when you found these patterns (and managed to get a smaller output) will be matched by the times you found no patterns (and therefore the output was larger), such that the average compression ratio over a large enough amount of inputs will tend to 1.

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

#547

Post by shkkmo »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #444
shkkmo wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google held onto his data for him for over half a year after his plan was cancelled. Google clearly communicated that he needed to address the issue and he chose to do nothing during that time. Now they are warning him that they are suspending his account in 7 days. If he continues to do nothing they will then notify him again before cancelling his account and deleting his data. Google makes plenty of bad choices, bu…

> Google clearly communicated that he needed to address the issue and he chose to do nothing during that time. That's not clear at all. > If he continues to do nothing What is he supposed to to with 277TB of data in 7 days? Google can't even serve him all of his data in that timeframe. He's being treated like his account is doing some undesirable activity that he can just stop doing at a moment's notice, not a techni…

> What is he supposed to to with 277TB of data in 7 days? Google can't even serve him all of his data in that timeframe. He's being treated like his account is doing some undesirable activity that he can just stop doing at a moment's notice, not a technical data migration.

At this point, all he can probably do is start deleting files to avoid account cancellation. If he wanted to move all the data elsewhere, he had over half a year to do that.

How can you possibly think that over half a year of free service isn't enough of an accommodation? In what world does it make sense to assume that having your subscription terminated and you storage put into read only mode means it is OK to just leave it there and do nothing if you want to keep it?

He took full advantage of an amazingly good deal on a unlimited storage plan, then when it was cancelled, continued to assume he could just leave the data there for free. Google could legally just have pulled the plug on him for continuing to abuse a service he wasn't paying for.

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

#548

Post by fauigerzigerk »

sangnoir wrote: post #485
tmpz22 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small business likely would - at least at the customers expense. A medium size business might if you could talk to a reasonable person in the right department and they had the time to do it. Its beyond the ability of a large company. This is what people are actually angry about. As a company gets more and more successful (size/revenue) it becomes less capable at going above and beyond for the majority of their cust…

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>Not for a freeloader who was in the top 0.1% of usage without paying a dime.

This is a very unfair characterisation. He paid for an enterprise plan that was specifically targeted at enterprises with exceptionally high storage needs.

We don't know how much storage other enterprises in that target group were using. Comparing it with typical storage requirements of consumers makes absolutely no sense.

Also, it's not very interesting if he was in the top 0.1% because someone always is. That doesn't make it freeloading.

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

#549

Post by threatofrain »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #540
threatofrain wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all free anything people who over-consume threaten the model for everyone. I hate that the end result is that nobody should have it. We're all subsidizing the extreme users and we should desire that those customers are fired. All those rules at a buffet are just codifying ethics because the business has learned that it's stupid to trust people.

You are blaming the users for taking "unlimited" literally, while it was the company who said the plan was "unlimited" in the first place. Nobody forced them to market it that way. If they know 99.9% of users are fine with 1Tb, then they should sell them that and not lie in their marketing.

Yes, I'm blaming the kinds of users who persuade buffets to make up hostile and unpleasant rules for people. If firing a small % of users changes the equation for everyone then customers should be all for it.

When customers exploit any concept of free, even the bathroom in a fast food restaurant, that starts a culture where businesses give you a code so you can pee. You can call this being up-front or honest, but I call it the depletion of goodwill.

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

#550

Post by shwouchk »

rcoveson wrote: post #510
sangnoir wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat. It's a poor analogy. There are cloud storage users in every order-of-magnitude bracket from 10^0 to 10^15 bytes used. S3 is not like Chuck-a-Rama. A businessperson that attempts to treat them like they are similar will be forced…

I believe the object of discussion was google who /did/ have a Chuck-A-Rama like offering.

Specific common sense amount is an unreasonable demand. How long should a customer be allowed to stay in a buffet? Is it an hour? 1:30? 3 hours? I don’t know. Maybe? Depends.

Is it reasonable to come in, pay once, and stay for a month in the restaurant (if it was a 24/7 establishment)? Probably not.

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