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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

#551

Post by godelski »

shwouchk wrote: post #536
godelski wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the depth of this comment chain has anything to do with the UX design. The words on that warning are unequivocally interpretable as "the data will not be deleted." At the end of the day, it doesn't even matter if hidden in the terms of service or somewhere if it is made clear that the data will be deleted. It doesn't even matter if it is clear to @andrewmutz and @garblegarble that the data will be delet…

> What matters is if not thinking the data would be deleted is a reasonable interpretation. Full stop. In what world would it be reasonable to expect Google to pay thousands of dollars per year indefinitely to store your data for free?

In the world where Google says they will.

This conversation cannot be had unless you will read the article and look at the screenshots.

> to store your data for free?

Where was it said that this was free? Per the article

> So I paid Google a lot of money for a long time for a plan that included unlimited storage

Please RTFA before responding. It really isn't that long. Maybe 1.5 TikTok videos for the attention impaired.

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

#552

Post by callalex »

justrealist wrote: post #156
cedilla wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google offered "as much storage as you need" for the Workspace account, without attaching a condition on a required number of seats. It's not a loophole if a customer takes them up on the offer. I'm usually sympathetic with businesses who failed to appreciate how much power very few power users really have, but this is Google we're talking about. Their sales and legal department is larger than 90% of tech companies.…

This is like getting kicked out of McDonalds for ordering a small order of french fries and instead eating 400 ketchup packets. Things are free when people don't abuse it. Just be normal. Jesus.

Mac Donald’s doesn’t advertise and sell for money access to unlimited ketchup packets as a product. Google did.

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

#553

Post by not_a_shill »

mmstan wrote: post #172
boringg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crisis (!?) is a bit dramatic. 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.

From the article: "Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account." I don't see how can this be seen as "taking advantage of a system".

You do see but you're choosing to make an argument for the sake of "sticking it to MegaCorp" or something similar.

Every single person who had these 100+ TB plans knew it was unsustainable. When you have that much data you know how much it costs for hard drives to store that much data.

If the article had actually stated the amount the guy paid per month (what,$20-$60?) everyone would know that he should've known this was coming.

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

#554

Post by not_a_shill »

Nicksil wrote: post #126
boringg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crisis (!?) is a bit dramatic. 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.

>the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system Why do you think this?

>Why do you think this?

Because people with that much data know how much it costs to buy hard drives to store that much data.

Ask any of them how Google was supposed to make money off of them as a customer and watch them go for a gold in mental gymnastics.

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

#555

Post by thinkharderdev »

bluesroo wrote: post #487
thinkharderdev wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> raised prices when those competitors folded This part only works if you don't have other large competitors. But this obviously not the case for cloud storage. It is an extremely competitive commodity product. > bad for consumers How exactly is it bad for consumers to get products below cost?

That argument that GP is making isn't that low prices are bad for consumers. The argument is that amortized over the lifetime of the business, the prices are actually significantly higher because they are able to momentarily drive their prices down, eat the losses long enough to run their competition out of business, and then immediately break the low-priced agreements with their customers. Sure, they may be a commod…

> That shouldn't exempt them from holding up their agreements from when they were still competing for market space.

What agreement? They offered a service with no guarantees that it would be provided in perpetuity. If they offered "free unlimited storage for life" and then backed out of that based on some legalese on page 75 of their EULA then I agree that would be slimy. But that is not what happened here.

> they are able to momentarily drive their prices down, eat the losses long enough to run their competition out of business

This can happen and when it does it is anti-competitive. But that is not what happened in this case. Do you really think that Google thought they could drive AWS and Microsoft out of business with below cost storage on Google Drive? Seems unlikely. And even if they somehow managed to do that, they would immediately have competitors undercutting them on price again as soon as they raised prices enough.

What seems much more likely to me is they offered unlimited storage as a competitive feature of Google Workspace thinking it would still be profitable even with some customers using much more storage. But because we can't have nice things a bunch of people realized they could essentially use the unlimited plan as an ultra-cheap object storage service and were storing 100s of TB of data. Rather than raise everyone's prices to subsidize bad actors, it seems much more reasonable to just discontinue unlimited storage.

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

#556

Post by shwouchk »

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.

They did have such a plan. In fact, to get unlimited storage, an individual had to buy 3 (And I think later, 5) seats. And it was indeed not limited, at least as far as I could tell.

Until these got abused, my guess by pirate crowd to store huge media collections (eg search “plex gdrive”), and the plan went away. Did google promise they would keep this plan up forever?

Unlimited does not mean infinite and does not mean forever. It means you are getting access/capacity as you need, without “needing to worry about details” /presuming reasonable usage/. They were not fired as a customer. No limits were imposed. Until google decided to end it for everyone, likely specifically due to customers as above.

What if someone stored 200PB on their “unlimited” account? Would you expect google to give a 5 year warning to make sure someone had enough time to download their data to their laptop?

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

#557

Post by callalex »

oefrha wrote: post #60
ofrzeta wrote: post #29

Google charges USD 0,15/GB for egress traffic out of GCP. That's USD 36864 for 240TB. Am I right? EDIT: Actually egress seems to be 0,08. So roughly half of what I wrote.

No, download from Google Drive (Workspace or not) is free. They don’t promise they’ll actually let you download 240TB in 7 days, though. Honestly, /r/datahoarder with their 240TBs or more is why we can’t have nice things…

No, Google flat out lying by calling something that is limited as “unlimited” is why we can’t have nice things. I don’t understand why anyone would go out of their way to defend blatant liars.

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

#558

Post by azemetre »

renewiltord wrote: post #484
azemetre wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this the journalist’s fault? Don’t offer an unlimited plan if you don’t want people using it. I have to think the only reason why the journalist hasn’t sued Google for breach of contract is fear of more retribution from Google. Imagine getting banned from YouTube, not appearing in search queries, or not having access to your gmail after winning in small claims court. It’s disgusting and shows why big tech need…

I believe most companies don't offer unlimited plans anymore these days. And Google probably removed theirs because of use cases like this. Fault isn't what's being assigned. Just that sometimes people offer deals that have no explicit limits except that the deal terms say that either party can exit at any time. Then once the deal moves out of the band where it is mutually beneficial, one party invokes the terms and…

Idk if that’s always the case. I still have unlimited data plan from my mobile provider, from 2008ish. $50 for unlimited data (no it’s not rate limited either).

Obviously the cellular provider hates this but they can’t remove something I’m paying for and haven’t broken the contract. They do try to get me off the plan several times a year offering new phones fully paid if I switched.

Fuck them, I paid for it and I’m not going to leave. It’s not my fault a multi billion dollar corporation didn’t get one over me.

I’m glad I live in an area with good protections against this corporate abuse.

Absolutely disgusting what Google has done. I’ll keep this in mind 5 years from now when I have the power to spend real money on budgets and ensure that I never give Google a cent of it.

It takes decades to build a reputation and minutes to destroy it. Google has destroyed theirs.

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

#559

Post by latexr »

HackerThemAll wrote: post #412

Do people really believe that almost $10.000 worth of cloud storage per year and any amount of egress network traffic for viewing that is given them for free FOREVER? Can you be that naive? And, did the author forget that Microsoft had done the same couple of times already? It's easy and trendy to bitch on Google. https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/microsoft-onedrive-unlimi... https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-ha…

> Do people really believe that almost $10.000 worth of cloud storage per year and any amount of egress network traffic for viewing that is given them for free FOREVER? Can you be that naive?

Do companies really believe they can promise untenable amounts of free stuff indefinitely and not have upset customers when they take it away? Can they be that naive? Google isn’t the victim here.

> It's easy and trendy to bitch on Google.

Maybe they should stop screwing people all the time if they don’t want to be constantly criticised.

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

#560

Post by matkoniecz »

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…

They had local copies. They were stolen by FBI. It is in the linked article.
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