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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

#631

Post by johnnyanmac »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #494
crooked-v wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> after you stop paying The difference here is that Google was the one who fired him as a customer, and did so on a timeframe tight enough to make it functionally impossible to actually get all his data back.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the "firing of the customer" (i.e. the cancellation of the subscription by Google) occurred >6 months before any actual deletion of the data. The alert that data would be deleted occurred 7 days before. It's difficult to argue that he couldn't have seen this coming.

>It's difficult to argue that he couldn't have seen this coming.

around the same time the FBI raided him. I imagine he was quite busy as is.

And there's a difference between "he should have seen this coming" and "he should have seen his data being deleted coming a week after the grace period with no wrning until the week before."

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

#632

Post by johnnyanmac »

nickelpro wrote: post #216
Nicksil wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Things are free when people don't abuse it. Just be normal. Jesus. Well, no, things are free until they stop being free. Who gets to decide what "normal" means.

There's no such thing as unlimited anything in business. Every unlimited plan simply means, "we won't tell you the limits."

sounds like they need to tell people the limits or stop false advertising.

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

#633

Post by johnnyanmac »

jsnell wrote: post #174
Nicksil wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>as if the payments for data storage in the past would entitle him to store the data indefinitely into the future as well. Why do you think he thought this?

Because he stopped paying for the service of unlimited storage for this month (as that service was no longer offered), didn't migrate the data to somebody offering a better deal, and expected for it to be retained indefinitely?

I think you need context. Google stopped offering unlimted storage, the journalists was raided by the FBI some 7 months ago, and during that legal dispute he was occupied until Google gave a 7 day ultimatim.

He already did have data backed up, and it was seized by the government because Fox News or Kayne West really didn't want that news page (live on a URL already) "leaked" or whatever.

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

#634

Post by johnnyanmac »

shkkmo wrote: post #347
Nicksil wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And he was never paying "a lot of money" for this. You're being obtuse: "a lot of money" in this context is a relative amount and you know that.

And in this case, that amount is an order of magnitude lower that what the service cost to provide. It seems odd that after underpaying by a lot for a long time, that the user would complain that they were given 2 months of free service and then 5 more months of read-only access to get their stuff off. Sure, Google should have communicated more clearly but Burke's expectations here are also entirely unreasonable. The…

I think the point is Google could have communicated more clearly, and we shouldn't understate that. You don't give a business (since this was an enterprise account) a week to take action. That's unacceptable. A large business may need a week just to get the paperwork ready for the employee to start the migration.

This is a common problem and it has screwed over many other people. we can't just leave livlihoods to the whimsy of automated bots without some human to contact.

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

#635

Post by jdiez17 »

tmpz22 wrote: post #462
lwhi wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their own cost, or at the very least, at customer cost. A company which provides literally no way to get data out and offloads expenses is a POS company. Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.

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…

You nailed it. People don't necessarily hate capitalism, companies or business owners. However, this late stage capitalism with huge faceless companies that are unable to care for people, seem to be above the law and are just profit-extraction machines is quite a trip.

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

#636

Post by compsciphd »

frognumber wrote: post #80
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…

> 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" Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position. He doesn't need to just find someone willing to store his data.…

I had a business account that was told they were cancelling the service. We were given 3 months or so notice.

What I believe happened (as happened to many other people as can see from rclone forum) is that some people decided that they were going to simply go into "overage" mode, as that assumed that google would keep their data around when over quota, just it be locked into read only mode (so the data would remain, but just be readable, they couldn't add anything to it).

Google decided that this wasn't something they were going to support, so people who went into read only mode, have now been getting the letters that their data is going to be deleted.

i.e. they have been for months paying google for an account that they knew is over quota.

200TB is fairly easily extractable over 3 months from google drive if one plans correctly. You have a 10TB download quota a day, which one would need a gigabit/s connection to hit. If you have only 250megabit connection, it will take 80 days. Bumping up on the 3 month warning I had, but still doable especially if one filters out unnecessary things.

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

#637

Post by compsciphd »

godelski wrote: post #551
shwouchk wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 impair…

"google product experts" aren't generally google employees and aren't speaking for google.

i.e. that support site is mostly user to user help, which is perhaps an indictment on google in general, but sadly in this case can't be used for saying "where google says".

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

#638

Post by that_guy_iain »

flavius29663 wrote: post #564
that_guy_iain wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> not to get wound up by massive edge cases that impact 1-2 people But you never know who those 2-3 people are (2-3 people out of how many? surely there are more screwed by google). You might be one next time they decide to cancel accounts for new reasons and leave people without their stuff, there is no way to know when you're suddenly in breach of google's made up rules. And when you are, there is no recourse. > Th…

> But you never know who those 2-3 people are (2-3 people out of how many? surely there are more screwed by google). You might be one next time they decide to cancel accounts for new reasons and leave people without their stuff, there is no way to know when you're suddenly in breach of google's made up rules. And when you are, there is no recourse.

I might be, but I am not going to be flaming the shit out of Google about it. I've been the edge case many times in scenarios just like this and I knew I was taking full advantage and eventually it would have to stop. And there was plenty of notice about the rule change.

> If taking medical pictures of your child, with no intent of distributing them on the internet is not an edge case, then I don't know what to say. Maybe you work for google.

Lots of people were in roughly the same boat during COVID. There would have been thousands of people taking pictures of their child to send to doctors every day. People need non-urgent medical attention every day, that is not an edge case. Taking pics to send to your doctor during covid was not an edge case.

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

#639

Post by godelski »

compsciphd wrote: post #637
godelski wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impair…

"google product experts" aren't generally google employees and aren't speaking for google. i.e. that support site is mostly user to user help, which is perhaps an indictment on google in general, but sadly in this case can't be used for saying "where google says".

> sadly in this case can't be used for saying "where google says".

I think we're looking at very different things.... there's a screenshot of a literal official email from Google, under the Google Workspace Team. Not sure where you're getting "Google product experts". Did you mean to reply to a different comment?

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

#640

Post by frognumber »

godelski wrote: post #613
frognumber wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel at all bad about throttling mobile data. For reference, the standard scam before was to offer $40/month for e.g. 1GB of data. At that point, you'd pay a crazy amount for each additional MB of data. This was horrible with very fast data, where you could accidentally burn through the whole quota with a misclick e.g. grabbing a large download. Unlimited with throttle is super-friendly in comparison. I need…

Oh, I actually appreciate unlimited with throttle. They've always had data caps too but I wouldn't be surprised if the average user knew about them. But maybe the overage plan manager did because Fi is niche? And sorry, I was just bringing up Fi as an example of something being unlimited since so many people were acting like nothing is.

Well, no. Fi is not unlimited. This is how it works.

My cell network (not Fi) has crazy fast internet (I'd throttle it if I could, t avoid overusing it).

If I go over some amount, it goes to 3G speeds (probably 200kbps or similar).

If I were to run at 3G speeds -- continuously, peak speed -- for a month, I couldn't e.g. hit a terabit of data. Ergo, there is a cap, and it's short of 100GB. You cannot get to 100GB be because of the throttle.

I think this is very good behavior, but it is capped.

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