
Google One - amzans
https://one.google.com/
======
guiseroom
A couple of months ago I stumbled across Google One; I thought it was a
replacement for Google Drive. I got a popup chat and talked with a Google Rep,
asking for clarity. The fact that it wasn't easily understandable from the
site wasn't a good sign. Once I learned it was just the latest new way to
upgrade Google storage, something I did not need, I ended the chat and went
about my business. A few days later I received an email from the Google Play
store confirming my purchase of additonal storage through Google One,
something I had not requested or purchased, although somehow just being on the
One site triggered that purchase. I was really taken aback because I didn't
even realize Google had my purchase information. I've never purchased anything
from/through Google. I had to go back to the One site, open a chat and then
spend the better part of an hour trying to get the charge reversed, which is
something they don't usually do.

So basically what I'm trying to say is this: Do not click through to the
Google One site.

edit: I should also add that I originally had 17 GB of Google Drive storage
(15 GB all users get plus an extra 2 GB for doing some Google survey or
something some years ago) but after the Google One storage grift was reversed,
my storage went back down to 15 GB. I guess there was a 2 GB penalty.

------
0xsnowcrash
Another typically badly explained Google product.

You arrive at one.google.com and all it says is something about your storage.
Is that what it's all about?

Here's what it says in the Google Description (you have to Google what
one.google.com is to find out what it does - hilarious!).

"Get expanded cloud storage, access to help from Google experts, and more
benefits — in one simple plan that you can share with your family."

So, from this it's storage + experts + some mysterious other benefits - and
it's about sharing it with your family.

Why don't they at least say that on their front page?! The reason, cos Google
don't employ any decent usability experts.

~~~
maest
From what I can tell it's:

* extra storage (google drive + google photos + gmail).

* phone photos and contacts backed up (there's a Google One app)

* "access to experts"

* discount on google purchases in "Google Store" \- so for Pixels and DayDreams? Does Stadia count?

* discount when booking hotels through google.

Super weird mix of features. The meat of the offering seems to be more
storage.

~~~
sundayedition
I didn't get a discount on my stadia preorder, purchased in July. Of course,
it hasn't shipped yet either and the originals release/delivery date was
supposed to be the 19th iirc.

------
giarc
Google One has been available for a while. I'm not sure why this link was
submitted, and how it made it to the front page of HN?

~~~
WalterSobchak
Agreed. Here is the previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18678929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18678929)

------
gravypod
As someone who pays for multiple Google services this is not something I'm
interested in at all.

I would be very interested in something that gave me the paid features in all
of their services: YouTube red (no ads + custom content no one likes), Google
storage (one), Google Plus Music (or whatever they're replacing it with) for
"infinite" music, YouTube TV, Stadia, and my Fi account.

If Google integrated these billing systems and made a cohesive feature set
that was constantly expanding it would be a no brained to spend like
+$50/month on this bundle (phone + backups + entertainment).

I'm assuming they don't do this because of fragmentation across product teams
or anti monopoly stuff.

~~~
dmitriid
It’s also because Google Accounts is such a complicated mess by now that no
one inside Google knows how it works:
[https://grumpy.website/post/0PU1U2r3v](https://grumpy.website/post/0PU1U2r3v)

~~~
crazygringo
That's all just UX complaints.

Behind the scenes, a Google account is a single unified Google account, as far
as I know.

(In other words, individual products can be confusing, but I don't think the
backend inherently prevents unified billing.)

~~~
neogodless
Tell that to someone using G Suites! I don't know the real internal structure,
but I've experienced a frustrating number of "unsupported features" or
"unexpected errors."

------
okintheory
From looking at Google's privacy policy for this product, it seems to me that
if I have a file called all-my-deepest-secrets-fears-and-desires.txt stored in
Google's cloud, then nothing stops Google from sharing what they learn from
this file as long as it is "non-personally identifiable information". That
sounds like they can do whatever they want, as long as they don't attach my
actual name to it.

~~~
mojuba
The irony of "non-personally identifiable information" is that there is no
such thing. Just show me your regular everyday travel destinations, i.e.
mostly home -> work -> home and I will identify you. Not to mention card
purchases (Google bank accounts to the rescue!) that contain more information
than you know about yourself.

Or if you are a software engineer, show me enough of your source code with
file names etc. (including your commercial work) and I might be able to match
you against the full LinkedIn database for example, although I probbaly won't
be able to automate this one. Etc. etc.

Nothing is ever completely anonymous unless you get to the level of elementary
physical particles which as we know don't have an identity :)

~~~
okintheory
Completely agree. It's a smoke screen, but probably one that holds up in court
- for now.

------
thih9
Launched August 15, 2018; 14 months ago.

Source:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_One](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_One)

Shouldn’t we add „[2018]” to the title?

~~~
WalterSobchak
Good idea. I would like to see this added as well.

------
torgoguys
The price jump from 2TB to 10TB is weird. 5x storage for 10x price. The other
storage/price increments give you a "quantity discount" (e.g., twice as much
storage for a 50 percent price increase) but that one is the opposite. Any
guesses as to why they chose to do that?

~~~
lis
If you need more than 2TB it's quite likely that you are using the product in
a professional context. Thus, they are able to charge more. The smaller tiers
are cheap to be attractive to end consumers.

------
bachmeier
What happens if one of Google's bots decides to delete your account? Is that
it for your family's picture collection?

~~~
linsomniac
That's something I also worry a bit about. They do have Google Takeout, and I
recently used that to download the 120GB-ish worth of stuff I've got in there,
and it worked very well. I guess I should set up a job to back that up to B2?

------
joeblau
Does this get rid of ads? I would pay for this if all of the Ads in Search,
Gmail, YouTube, and every other Google product they pushed went away.

~~~
rkeene2
I don't think Google One does, but that is a service you can pay for:
[https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing](https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing)

~~~
lxgr
Oh, TIL! However, for me this site only shows a landing page and an empty
slide menu behind a hamburger button. Is this launched yet?

~~~
tooop
Support page -
[https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6182579](https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6182579)

------
alfiedotwtf
Every time I see a new product from Google, I think of Reader.

Edit: let's be honest with ourselves... you do too

------
goldcd
I upgraded a few months back, as I'd exceeded by drive limit and the upgrade
to 2Tb storage dumped me into this new "Google One" thing.

I'm actually pretty happy with it, as I just entered into it as the next
storage tier. First up, it gave me a "click here for a free google home", and
you get a 10% credit back if you buy hardware from them. Not deal-makers, but
nice bonus when I just came for the storage.

What I did find useful is that you can now share your storage with other
people. I can just add my aged family members and relax a bit knowing they
have actually got some running backup in place.

I would like it if it was combined with Youtube Premium/Red which I also pay
for, even though I use Spotify over Google music.

------
tbrock
Love that the front page shows me how much storage some hypothetical user
needs yet I’m logged into google (can see my icon at top) and it doesn’t show
how much storage I need.

Complete design fail.

~~~
judge2020
[https://one.google.com/storage](https://one.google.com/storage)

~~~
maest
To be fair, I don't see a link to that from the front page.

Still, nice that they've implemented it.

------
tw04
Let me guess: doesn't work with google apps accounts, because google really
wants people to stop using them but isn't dumb enough to straight pull the
plug quite yet.

~~~
mkozlows
I mean, it doesn't, but this time it actually makes sense: If you want more
storage as part of a GSuite account, you just buy it. There's no reason to buy
a consumer-focused package for a business offering that has the same thing
already available as part of its billing.

------
linsomniac
I've used the "One" "Family Plan" for a couple years, whatever it was before
One. It's nice, but I do worry about the non-linear pricing. For 200GB at
$3/mo, that's fine. Then for 2TB it drops per GB to $10/mo.

The next jump is 10TB for $100/mo (double the per/GB). But my storage
consumption doesn't jump like that, I won't go from 2TB to 10TB (probably).
Which makes 3TB feel like $33/GB/mo...

S3 is linear and drops. B2 is linear. Google Fi refunds me for actual usage
below what I've paid for. Why is storage so weird?

------
Havoc
Doesn't support own domain as best as I can tell, which makes it a non-starter
for me.

Think I might just move to protonmail instead of gsuite

------
aluminussoma
I've heard, but can't confirm, that photos and videos stored on Google are
used to train ML models at Google. So I'm surprised that Google would want to
charge at all for this service if it's important.

Were any other company able to get you to store your photos and videos, I
wonder if that could dent Google's ML capabilities a bit.

~~~
arghwhat
To use people's random images for training, they would have to be manually
annotated by a human (e.g. facial boxes, eyes, nose, mouth, ears drawn in).

There are also diminishing returns from additional data if it does not bring
vastly new scenarios to train against.

Access to raw data alone is rarely a problem, so I would personally doubt that
Google would have much value in Google Photos for training.

~~~
_wp_
> To use people's random images for training, they would have to be manually
> annotated by a human (e.g. facial boxes, eyes, nose, mouth, ears drawn in).

That's not true. There is a large and growing body of research on semi-
supervised, self-supervised, and unsupervised learning that can take advantage
of these unlabelled images.

~~~
arghwhat
Different learning techniques have different applications. I do not believe
those techniques are applicable to the hypothetical use-cases of this dataset.

Perhaps semi-supervised could be utilized, which reduces the required
annotation by some factor _k_ , but still leaves it as a function of the
dataset.

Self-supervised basically replaces human annotation with machine annotation,
making it only applicable to a small subset of tasks in which this is possible
(e.g. you could train "guess time from picture" using EXIF timestamp).

Unsupervised is only applicable to very specific tasks.

------
tpetry
So it‘s a possibility to really get support from Google? Or is it the same
support like any non-paying user?

------
rad_gruchalski
Does this give me a human support? Otherwise it's a bit meh.

------
kstenerud
Ugh. No.

These past two decades have been about freeing us from vendor lock-in. The
last thing I'd want is to go back to that!

------
flaxton
About a month ago, a hacker guessed a weak password on one of my seldom-used
Google accounts. They changed the password and the recovery email.

I attempted to get the account back, including telling them the old password,
old recovery email, and the month and year I opened the account (like 10 years
ago) but no, they said they “couldn’t” do it.

So I’m sunk. No recourse, no one to appeal to.

So why would I put my whole life into Google? When it can be taken away so
quickly, and there is no appeal process?

On my main Google account I do have a recovery email (that I host) and 2FA.
But I do not feel secure that the same thing couldn’t happen there too.

If it does, you are sunk.

I’m actually in the process of moving everything off of Google.

No thanks!

~~~
pas
You could be the hacker who got hold of the old recovery email. :/

There's no safe way to do these recovery processes.

Weak/lost/compromised password means that, the account is gone.

Sure it'd be nice to have a fallback that ties recovery to visiting an office,
where you establish some shared secrets, biomarkers, etc. But big companies
are not into that because probably too few people pay for this. (As they also
don't want to depend on a 3rd party for identity management.)

~~~
klipt
> There's no safe way to do these recovery processes.

Imagine if banks said the same thing. "Oh someone changed the password and
email on your bank account, sorry you permanently lost access to all that
money."

If you signed up with your real name, some combination of government id, proof
of physical address etc should be enough for recovery. If it's good enough for
banks, shouldn't it be good enough for email?

~~~
oefrha
Okay, so you’re proposing that Google ask for your government ID when you sign
up for a Gmail account?

~~~
kijin
It doesn't even need to be government ID. As soon as you pay for something,
like starting a Google One subscription or buying an app on the Play Store,
your billing information should establish your identity. Later when you need
to get your account back, you may need to present some sort of government ID
and/or proof of address that matches your billing information. It's not
bulletproof but it's better than losing access to a paid account forever.

~~~
oefrha
A paid account, sure, I assume that might already be the case? I certainly
don’t expect to lose access to my GSuite account or Google Fi account if I
forget my password. However, ggp seems to be talking about a free account, as
the vast majority of Gmail accounts are.

~~~
kijin
Yeah, that's unfortunate. But I wouldn't expect a free account to be
recoverable. You need to have put something on file, whether government ID or
billing info, in order for anyone to verify whether someone who claims to be
you is actually you. Americans are weirdly averse to using government IDs, so
billing info is really the only option.

