> 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. He need to get his data out. Trying to get my data out of Google, I've gotten ~1TB out in ~1 week. This is about a year's worth of time to not lose it.
The facts are not "even less inflammatory."
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.
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 withdrew the unlimited service he was using?
I'm no fan of Google, and I agree with you that a good service would have offered an at-or-slightly-above-cost data export for that volume of data... but he's deliberately misrepresenting the situation here (either that or is painfully naive)
Edit: as somebody else pointed out downthread, he also would have received numerous e-mails throughout 2022 telling him that the unlimited service was being shuttered
The six-month grace period notice pretty clearly states his data would be read-only, while the seven-day notice seems to be the first time destruction is even mentioned. I think we can both agree that there's a world of difference between data being read-only and being destroyed. I think it's completely reasonable to say he has 7 days to download it.
"If I cancel my additional storage, will all the files/documents that took up the additional space, be deleted? Or will I still have access to them?"
"You will still have access to all your files but, if you have used all storage you won't be able to add or create NEW files until you have space available."
Which sounds like you're right, unless the Product Expert was wrong.
The fact that this comment chain is about 7 deep trying to figure out whether the customer was given enough notice or not I think is also evidence that Google has a terrible UX for this anyway.
If your data is going to be deleted, it should be painfully obvious well in advance.
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 deleted[0]. What matters is if not thinking the data would be deleted is a reasonable interpretation. Full stop. It also matters that when explicit communication (unequivocally interpreted as slated for deletion) that the user was given 7 days, which was not even enough time, especially considering Google's egress rates.
There's a lot of this on HN lately and I'm not sure why. Communication is fuzzy people, I'm not sure why that's surprising. But when there's disagreement don't ask yourself which is right or wrong, but if a reasonable interpretation was made. Because communication is like an autoencoder: there's what's in your head (input), what you say (lossy compressed intermediate latent), and what is received (decompressed information with imputation). There's too many attempts to defend a believed objective reality which just is absurd (ironically making the view less objective).
And, importantly, RTFA
[0] Obviously these two are reading between the lines. It is not a bad interpretation and we often should practice this, especially to be on the safe side, but it's clear that there is inference, so what's wrong with the comments is their strong assertions that the communication was obvious. One may also make the argument that Techdirt isn't telling the full story or timeline, but that's also a different issue and inferential.
"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?
if you're referring to something else, I missed that reference, so my apologies then.
I do think google gave sufficient time to move off. I also don't think a "workspace" being in read only mode was ever meant to be a permanent position for that google workspace. i.e. it was meant that "we weren't going to suddenly delete you data if you were over quota, but its your responsibility to get under quota or your account will be at risk".
though if you can point to the official email from google (I'd have to find the ones they sent me, unsure if I kept or deleted them).
I apologize, I forgot that was in a comment above. Personally I'm not concerned with what the product experts said but rather the official from Google emails I'm talking about are in the screenshot of the article where it doesn't say anything about removing or deleting data. I'm also not concerned if you have to click links for more information or Google to figure out Google's policy. What matters is what's in the direct email.
> i.e. it was meant that "...its your responsibility to get under quota or your account will be at risk".
In person to person language I think we can rely on inference because there's good feedback mechanisms to resolve (like was done here). But in corporate communication I don't think you have the same luxury. Especially when you're a corporation that has no person to talk to to resolve misunderstandings. Instructions must be explicit and to such a degree that no reasonable person could misinterpret. It's why they hire all those lawyers and that's what a court of law would hold them to. I think given the emails shown that there's reason to believe his data would not be deleted until the explicit 7 day notice.
> I do think google gave sufficient time to move off.
The account was given 60 days grace on May 11, 2023.
It’s currently December 15, 2023.
Google Enterprise (Unlimited) accounts are subject to the same 750GB/day limits (I have one of these accounts, my account has also gone RO).
As of today, it’s been 218 days since the notice that the account was over quota and in grace period.
In 218 days, you can download (assuming 100% efficiency) 163TB.
The user has >200TB stored in their drive.
The math doesn’t check out.
EDIT: > As of today, it’s been 218 days since the notice that the account was over quota and in grace period.
Up until that point, the user was still contracted to, and paying for, an unlimited storage solution. Any suggestions that the onus is on the user to be migrating their data out while still paying for a working solution is insane. The onus is on the provider to give the user time to migrate after the terms have changed. Unless we consider Google to be the Sith, in which case, yes, pray they don’t change the terms of the deal any more.
you can upload 750GB a day, you can download 10TB a day.
in about 2 months, I was able to get out over 100TB a data (using a 500mbps connection, wasn't downloading 24/7 but close to somewhere in the 25-50% of the time, and that math does check out).
>> In what world would it be reasonable to expect Google to pay thousands of dollars per year indefinitely to store your data for free?
Expect condescending comments when if you state things that are outrageous. Especially after responding to a comment that actively demonstrated that they did not read the article. If you disagree that this is a reasonable interpretation maybe clarify that. But this is also all you said, so I'm not sure what you expect me to read it as.
I think there is also sufficient reason to believe you did not read the chain of comments either. This is kinda like jumping into the middle of a conversation while having been zoned out. Sufficient evidence because you are revisiting something already discussed. If you would like to argue that his interpretation was unreasonable you should have provided reasoning to it. Don't play the victim here. You gave a low quality, emotional, and exaggeratory comment. No matter how good the argument is in your head, you can't expect a high quality response nor be upset when someone makes a quip remark. (idk why I'm even responding this one tbh)
__There was no ad hominem attack.__ I responded to your claim, and by quoting the article. I have not dismissed your claim based on your character nor even attacked your character. But I'll concede that I made a slight and my comment was condescending (see above for reasons). Additionally, my slights are not subverting the argument nor detracting from it. If you need clarification, an ad hominem attack is "you should ignore anything [insert user] has to say because they are dumb and voted for [insert political enemy]". See how it doesn't respond to what you said, moves the conversation away, and now places a new standard which must be rebutted which is not actually related to the subject matter? That's what makes it a logical fallacy. We have none of those qualities. Yet now here we are, not talking about the article or the contents...
You, on the other hand, did in fact make a logical fallacy. But that's already been addressed and we need not be more explicit nor derail the conversation further.
> This is not mentioned in the article but it is mentioned in other comments
Pro tip: do not assume the person you are replying to has read every comment under a post. You may assume they have read the direct chain of comments leading to the current point, but no more. If you are tired of saying the same thing maybe instead of saying "as I've already commented" maybe link your comment. Or chill, because frankly this isn't an issue of high importance and you don't have to really defend either situation because none of have a real horse in the race so idk why emotion is high. You should also only assume the context of the direct thread. If you want to claim that the author is hiding truth and that there was in fact clearer explicit ample warnings given, do so here, or provide a reference to your other comment. You cannot assume I am going to read through or search all >500 comments or search your username. Because frankly, I'm responding to what you said, not who you are. If your context is everything you said, including other comments unrelated to this direct chain, the contextual issue is with you not me.
tldr: low quality replies don't get high quality responses and I'm not going to search for every comment you made
I respectfully disagree. They were clearly given enough notice - from personal experience as I’ve commented already, as well as from sibling comments.
If you are still “figuring this out”, I daresay it is simply because you haven’t used the paid service and seen the frequent nagging emails about the transition.
Which is entirely likely, given that Google's "Product Experts" aren't employees with access to internal communication channels, they're just volunteers working for internet points.
No, I agree. Sorry, my phrasing there was poor. I meant: it is completely reasonable to say that "he has seven days to download it", not that it is completely reasonable for him to only have seven days.
'to say that...' is discussing which of the statements in the article is a better interpretation, 7 vs 60. It is not making any claims about the reasonableness of the 7 days to download the soon to be deleted data.
> 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 withdrew the unlimited service he was using?
I doubt he expected Google to store his data forever, and I don’t see anything indicating that this is what he expects. Forever is a straw man.
It would be reasonable to expect some kind of migration / off-boarding plan, and it’s Google’s responsibility to facilitate that after pulling the plug on services they previously committed to providing.
Why are we carrying water for Google here and blaming the user?
Google stated that it would remain in read-only mode and that’s the end of it. It’s bad enough they reneged on their agreement to store unlimited data for x amount of money, but according to you people need to be soothsayers to figure out that a company will reneg on their promise to maintain the data?
And none of that even takes into account that even 60 days wouldn’t be enough to download all that data.
Just stop it. Google is in the wrong and to add insult to injury they don’t provide any means of reaching a customer support representative to mitigate issues caused by their own incompetence.
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.)
Recently we announced that Google Podcasts will be discontinued next year. We wanted to reach out directly with more information on what to expect.
For now, nothing is changing, and you can continue to use Google Podcasts as normal. Over the coming months, podcasts in YouTube Music will be made available globally and we will start rolling out tools that will enable you to transfer your podcast show subscriptions from Google Podcasts. In YouTube Music, you will be able to listen to your podcasts just like you did on Google Podcasts, no paid subscription required. If YouTube Music isn’t for you, there will also be an option to download a file of your show subscriptions, which you can upload to an app that supports their import.
We acknowledge that this is a big change and want to thank you for being a loyal Google Podcasts user. We’ll reach out directly with more details over the coming months. In the meantime, if you have questions, please check out our Help Community here.
Sincerely,
The Google Podcasts team
The podcast app on my phone also has a nag text that mentions that it will be shutting down.
I was trying to say that we have well over a year in advance to prepare for the google podcast service to terminate.
If you ignore emails that is on you, not the service.
> There is no way this person wasn't aware of what was going to happen,
Sure. That's what it is. He's a grifter, grifting Google to try to shame them into giving him a quarter of a petabyte of storage for free. He knew all along that his data would be deleted, and waited to the last second because he figures this is a sure thing and he'll get to keep it forever. You caught him. I can't believe we all fell for it.
It's not as if non-technical people (and technical ones too!) can't be confused or overwhelmed, and he should have been able to telepathically read Google's collective hivemind that "goes into read-only mode" means "we'll delete all the shit you don't have room or time to put anywhere else".
Google sends multiple emails that are extremely clear about what is going to happen. If you ignore the emails or notifications, that is your fault, not on the service.
Like I mentioned above, even the Google podcast service is giving users over a year to prepare for the shutdown, and provides a method to transfer any data you have out of the app. If they take much precaution with a podcast app that few people even use, I guarantee they sent multiple emails to this person urging them to prepare for this.
If you don't check your email or just ignore it, that is not the service providers fault. Expecting a free service to bend over backwards for you even when they told you repeatedly to prepare for this is silly.
>I can't believe we all fell for it.
You fell for clickbait and exaggerated or fabricated stories from someone who either ignored their mail or waited til last minute and are now whining.
you seem the be extrapolating the actions in one service to what you think the actions are in another service, when direct evidence is saying that the other service has not in fact done what you are extrapolating. I don't really see why you think your extrapolation is more believable than the reported facts.
He had all his computers confiscated by the FBI and then realized that his backups were also being destroyed by Google. Calling this a grift is incredibly insulting.
> 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 customers. And we live in a world of increasingly large hyper consolidated companies. It feels like its only going to get worse from here. IMO thats where the legitimate angst is. Its going to get worse.
You're right, and it's paradoxical. Companies with poor customer service should be taking hits in the stock market and in the public eye, but Comcast is still around...
The guy in TFA should be a warning to others: you cannot trust other machines to handle your data responsibly. They'll turn on you and demand a ransom when it's convenient. Self-host, and own your infrastructure.
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.
>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.
I haven't seen any buffet advertize itself as offering "unlimited" food, but rather they say "all-you-can-eat" and then typically clearly clarify on the door and the front desk something like "on our premises, in under 2 hours".
Google should have been smart enough to not say "unlimited" if they don't mean it.
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 to make a U-turn and lose some face in the process.
These types of businesspeople should be fired urgently and with prejudice.
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?
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.
Stay on track: Cloud storage. Not a buffet. Cloud storage.
Lots of business need gigabytes. Lots of business need terabytes. That's a 1000x difference. That ratio is not very buffet-like!
People who need terabytes of cloud storage are not like people who try to scam buffets by taking home food in their pants. They are not like people who do unspeakable things to the free bathroom. They are just people with lots of data. There are business that have lots of data. It is a common business problem in today's world.
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.
My point is that it is easy to tell in the restaurant, and it is not easy to tell in a cloud storage context. We're not disagreeing about the former.
I actually have cloud storage customers at my company. If you asked me what an unreasonable amount of cloud storage consumption was, I would have a really hard time coming up with a number. A petabyte, I guess? We have customers that store kilobytes, and others that store many terabytes. Frankly we'd love a petabyte customer, because we actually charge people for storage, like any sane B2B storage offering. Some things are not meant to be unlimited.
But that’s precisely what drives the reasonableness decision. If you are paying for the product directly, do as you like. If you are paying for “unlimited”, expect an eventual harsh wake up call if your usage costs above and beyond what you are paying.
> 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.
Right, and not all commodities have workable "unlimited" business models. The fact that somebody wants it to be a business model doesn't mean it should be one.
It's possible to offer honest unlimited plans. The all-you-can-eat buffet is one example. Just write it down somewhere that there's a time limit and that each individual person has to pay, and just like that you've imposed a practical limit without imposing a literal one.
Google Fiber competes with Comcast in my area, and they're happily able to advertise "unlimited gigabit Internet". Which is awesome. It's good marketing, and not dishonest: Their competitor imposes a type of limit which they do not impose (a monthly consumption limit of 1 TB). Of course, we know that there is still an effective limit in place: You can still only consume at the rate of 1 GiB/s. It's right there in the name of the plan.
But "unlimited storage" is just dishonest, especially when you're selling to businesses. Some businesses need cloud storage for documents, others need it for storing RAW video. There's nothing unreasonable about a few hundred TB unless you're just totally oblivious to the cloud storage business.
Essentially I think you're defending a somewhat dishonest marketing technique. What is lost by putting a 10 TB limit on the plan? I guess it wouldn't sell as well? Because it's not a lie? Maybe it's less "flexible" (i.e. Google can't just go change it whenever they feel like it). It's not like I can't see why that's good for Google, I just can't see why it's good for their customers. If there's a limit, just say it. Your customers would certainly appreciate knowing. And for crying out loud I do not care that being just a little bit dishonest about it makes customers excited and gets more sales.
It may be nuts, but many companies offer this option.
It's not clear what Google is doing here is even legal. If a company is holding my property, they're usually required to make reasonable efforts to return it.
A former employer will usually ship your things back to you, for example, or find other ways to return them. Simply tossing things you had in your office in the trash is illegal.
A lost-and-found is where there's little or no business relationship and you didn't ask for the stuff.
If we have a formal relationship where you're holding on to my stuff or vice-versa as part of that relationship, you are generally required to return my stuff and I am required to return yours when the relationship ends. If I am working for you, and you have my tools at the office, you need to return them to me. If it's impractical for me to pick them up (e.g. I left them in an office in Alaska), that means you need to ship them to me at your cost. If a contractor has your data, and you don't renew the contract, they need to reasonably provide it back to you. If you are leaving a relationship and your ex has a bunch of stuff at your house, you need to return it. Etc.
That's very different from someone losing something on your property.
I suspect, in this case, if both sides had equal legal budgets, Google would lose a court case. Now, testing that is very impractical since legal budgets aren't equal, but from a pure justice perspective, that's how it works out.
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.
Had a very similar experience with google, except with maybe 20tb rather than 200, and no data loss.
They gave warnings at least a year in advance about the transition to google workspace from google for business or however it was called before. It was quite clear that this transition would eventually be mandatory and that it did not include unlimited space for a flat fee.
I punted on the transition for as long as possible, and when it finally arrived I temporarily added some accounts until I removed the excess data (mainly old backups I did not need anymore).
Nothing in life is unlimited and taking such a promise at face value appears to me as being willfully naive. Relying on such an offer as your main storage is begging for trouble. Expecting this to happen is precisely why I only stored backups there.
You don’t need to be an expert to do the math, consider that just to store the data, without any redundancy and without it being constantly spinning would have retailed at at ~ $4K using the cheapest drives (~25 8tb drives), and would have cost them ~$1/h or ~$700 to constantly run at CA electricity prices (~8W idle per drive). And this before redundancy, backups, bandwidth, etc. This is obviously unsustainable and will eventually end.
Same goes eg for dropbox, who offered “unlimited” storage for their business plan until fairly recently but now have the same limit of 5tb/acct as Google.
Who in their right mind would rely on such an obvious abuse of what was meant by “unlimited” to store the only copy of their life’s work?
Well... they could transition the data to tape with a delay for recovering it, instead of outright deleting it.
At that point, storing it would be pretty much free no?
Regardless, they promised something, then reneged, with little to no time to handle it.
The way they handled it in terms of getting rid of the service is pretty terrible.
Also apparently it wasn't his only copy - his others were taken, and now he's about to lose the last one.
As I and others mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, there was at least a year of warning. At least I was aware of this for about a year out.
Tape is cheaper but not free. A quick search[0] quotes it at ~few $ /TB/Yr. Even if we take it at $1 due to G scale, that’s still ~$250/Y to store the archives, roughly what the customer likely paid when it was stored on immediate access media.
I agree it would have been nicer of them to store an archive after they stop paying. I disagree that they reneged on their offer - despite being disappointed that the deal ended, would I expect it to be offered forever, especially given the potential for abuse? Of course not. Frankly I’m surprised it lasted this long.
As a consumer of paid products (as well as simply human), Im against being lied to by those who sell them.
However, advertising is not contract, and I wouldn’t want to hear the legalese of a contract whenever someone tries to sell me something (actually perhaps I would, maybe it would reduce the amount of ads One has to endure, but that’s beside the point as it isn’t a norm outside, perhaps, the medical industry).
I don’t consider this to be such a case. Was he capped at how much he would be able to store (other than by allowed bandwidth/traffic)? Was he promised this would last forever? Was he not given a warning a year in advance that this is ending?
No resource in this universe is unlimited, so your choice is either to be a pedant about what that means and then raise an uproar when your deliberate misunderstanding of colloquial language breaks, or attempt to understand specifically what is implied by the promise.
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 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 only. If it was just that, there wouldn't be any article.
The fact that they regret offering an unlimited plan doesn't, however, give them the right to tell him that they're going to give him 60 days before the data becomes read only but it won't be deleted and then suddenly tell him that actually his data is going to be deleted in 7 days, which isn't sufficient time to transfer it elsewhere.
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 if you offered an unlimited plan you should have to grandfather in customers that bought into that plan.
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.
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 data in case of an emergency -- enough to send and get emails and have GPS. I don't need 4k video streaming in an emergency. I don't want a $1000 bill for that. It keeps me in a sensible position, without requiring unlimited liability for the carrier.
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.
Yeah usually the thing about deadlines is that you should communicate them as harshly as possible, then let them slip when they do arrive. I.e. they want people off the service voluntarily and deal with the tiny fraction that refuses.
In this case, the initial notification (reproduced in the article) didn’t threaten to delete the files. Instead of communicating the threat harshly, it said that after 60 days his account would be placed in “read-only” mode.
It sounds like he (I think reasonably) believed that would be the new reality after the grace period: that he couldn’t write new files, but that his existing data would be accessible indefinitely in read-only form.
Sure, it’s clear from the context that Google vaguely wants him to stop being a headache for them. But planning for a read-only future is very different from planning for your data to be vaporized. As GP points out, Google could get eviction done in the same timeframe but save considerable face if the initial correspondence had said “you’re using way too much, it’s against our TOS, and we’re deleting your data in 30 days,” then given him a 30-day “reprieve” when the deadline drew near.
He wasn’t threatened harshly. He was told his data would become read-only, which he took at face value and assumed his data would remain safe. Then suddenly he was told the data would be deleted within seven days.
> He wasn’t threatened harshly. [...] he was told the data would be deleted within seven days
How exactly is that not a harsh threat? Sounds like a harsh threat to me. They were nice before, he didn't comply, now they're jerks. But it remains just a threat unless they actually wipe the data. Which they won't, because he's surely downloading it right now while we yell about it on HN.
And there’s no practical way to download that amount of data within seven days, just based on the bandwidth this would require. The situation would be totally different if they gave him six months notice for the deletion.
I think you're misunderstanding the contention upthread and confusing the threat ("we'll delete all your stuff in 7 days") with the actual enforcement of that threat (deleting said data, which hasn't happened, and I'm betting almost certainly won't as the guy will find some way to comply).
The poster upthread was trying (vainly, I guess) to make a distinction between the two.
Google initially told him that there was no hard deadline for getting the data off—just that his drive would be read-only as long as it was over the limit.
Then, 6 months later, they told him he had 7 days to get it off or it would be wiped.
Right, exactly. "He has 7 days or it would be wiped" is a threat, not a punishment. Was the data wiped or not? What are you willing to bet that we'll actually see a followup claiming the data was wiped? Almost certainly he's going to download the thing onto $3k of SSDs and get off the service, which is what everyone wants.
Moving 237.22 TB in 7 days requires ~3.14 Gbps of bandwidth, assuming that the clock starts ticking the moment that he actually starts moving data. In practice, the requirements would be even higher (subtracting out the time between notice being sent and read, plus time to actually set up alternative storage). Does Google even provide that level of read throughput to Google Drive customers?
I have to repeat the question: do you genuinely believe this data is going to be inevitably deleted, or maybe do you think that the threat will work and the guy will get his stuff downloaded somehow?
Do you similarly think it's perfectly ok for a loanshark to "threaten" to smash the customer's knees if they don't pay up in 7 days? Because obviously they wouldn't really do that?
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
Not a great comparison. It was an _enterprise_ plan with unlimited storage. What kind of enterprise did Google aim their "unlimited" message at if it excludes a small company (an individual journalist) with lots of video footage?
I think the answer is that Google did in fact target companies with exceptionally high storage needs. They were just assuming that everyone who had lots of data would also spend a lot on other services and that didn't pan out.
A better comparison is probably a restaurant promising unlimited coffee refills for life, forgetting to make it conditional on ordering food as well. Then some office worker who never eats breakfast turns up every morning for three double espresso refills.
I feel like this isn't the best example, such restaurant can say that its only unlimited if you drink it in-house, in plain view. You almost never can take out food or drinks in all-you-can eat restaurants.
Generating/collecting 200TB of data is however entirely normal in some professions. Something Google should be and almost certainly is aware of.
In your analogy it would be Amazon setting up an S3 front on their corporate unlimited Google account. That didn't happen, it was just someone with more data than average. Google knows very well what the distribution looks like.
A lot of restaurants place a limit on the size of the container you're allowed to use, and there's a cultural expectation that you won't loiter just to fill more soda. Assuming you bought food and are continuing to buy food, the unlimited soda is more of a hook to keep you there and has clearly outlined terms. Your bladder will also give way before your stomach does.
An all-you-can eat might ban you for getting more food but they won't pump your stomach to undo all the food they already gave you. Google already let him store that data, if they regret that they should ban him from storing more. Deleting his data after permitting him to store it is completely over the line. No buffet in the world runs like that, not even those owned by literal gangsters.
I really disagree with this type of literalism. Everybody knows nothing is really unlimited. It's marketing aimed at the naive.
I have no problem with banging on Google for offering "unlimited" things without telling you what the limits actually are. But at some point, you have to expect some level of knowledge and sophistication from the users. I think accumulating 237Tb of data is well past the point where you should not just take "unlimited" at face value, ask hard questions about exactly what the limits of what they're offering are, and move to a better supported service, even if it costs some money.
It's probably also time to re-think - do you really need 237Tb? That's a huge amount of data. Is this like raw 4k HD video of every interview you've ever done, uncut? Maybe it's time to cut down on things a bit.
In HN people have low expectations for google so a limit seems reasonable to us. Google behaving shitty doesn't surprise anybody here. But what about with the normies? Google has deliberately cultivated an image of extreme technical capability with the normies. Google have deliberately convinced the general public that Google are basically internet gods who can do things no other company can, using their computer wizard magic. A normie can therefore reasonably believe that google could store a petabyte for them, when more technical people should reasonably know that google has limits. These aren't contradictory.
If Joe Blow's computer shop down the street offered "unlimited storage" then normies would understand that to be bullshit. But when Google gives that offer, it's taken literally because Google. And this is Google's own damn fault, their PR teams built Google's reputation to impossible heights deliberately.
Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business)
Cloudflare’s content delivery network (the “CDN”) Service can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files. We will use reasonable efforts to provide you with notice of such action.
In other words, if you serve HTML / CSS / JS you'll be fine. Too much of anything else and at some point they will ask you to pay.
I've experienced this first-hand and they're pretty fair about it. I believe they asked me to upgrade to Enterprise once I was serving something like >10-20TB per month of images / audio files (this was several years ago though!)
> if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files
Lots of sites have images. When exactly can I start to expect paying? Will this unspoken limit change in the future? Will I be notified when it is? As-written, it doesn't seem that way since it's opaque.
Why do you think CF owe you an explanation of when you start paying? You're not paying them; they don't owe you anything.
I imagine it pretty much comes down to "did this one thing that an individual is free hosting suddenly become popular or are they constantly taking the piss/running a biz off free".
R2 has similarly misaligned pricing, and I don't think it comes with comparable ToS limitations: You pay per request, and not proportional to data egress. So theoretically you could use it to distribute huge files very cheaply. Assuming there is no maximum request duration, it could even be used with a long running connection to download a video as it's being watched.
Yes. They will flip on their customers sooner or later. It might be years. And so long as you are prepared to bail when the time comes, you may as well keep taking advantage. But if it's critical infrastructure, make sure you have a failover plan ready.
It has just seemed like people are big fans of the "free, unlimited" plans here. I use a provider that is pay-per-usage personally, which seems more sustainable.
Support is part of the cost that is rolled into that pay-per-usage fee IMO.
I've worked at multiple places that unfortunately paid for CF services (and support), and have consistently had trouble with them. And that doesn't include just general CF service instability for end users.
Ditto. We got locked into a long-term Cloudflare contract and regretted it immensely. So much stuff that’s beta quality, broken promises, terrible support. Looks great on the surface, until you need to actually rely upon it.
Contrast this "unlimited" with how gmail was rolled out – gmail didn't offer unlimited email storage, it just offered a number orders of magnitude greater than everyone thought was realistic at the time.
Sounds like you just made Google's case for them. They provided the service. They cancelled it. Not their problem what happens with customer data afterwards.
I hardly think it's fair to say that they were 'taking advantage'. If Google says unlimited, should the typical person really expect that to be taken away? That's a really bad look for Google. "If we offer something that's good value to you, expect it to be taken away suddenly in the future." Those are not the actions of a company I would want to rely on.
With modern connected devices, I absolutely do expect for features (or even total functionality) to be removed on a whim by the manufacturer. Cloud services are no different.
Lesson being: do not rely on devices or services that rely on a third party. They absolutely will screw you; it’s only a matter of time.
If you do not believe this, then I would say that you have not been around this industry long enough. There may be rare exceptions, but this should be your rule if you care about the longevity of your software and data.
Of course it is not acceptable. But I imagine every company out there that has skin in this game would boldly taunt in reply: “whachha gunna do ‘bout it?”
Sure, we could boycott. How often is that ever effective in this modern age? Is it ever, because I don’t think I ever heard of such outside of history books?
Our lawmakers are corrupt and wholly in the pocket of those who would stand to benefit from perpetuating this shameful status quo. From my perspective, there ain’t damn thing we can do to fix it (or a thousand other problems), unless we are ready to start holding them accountable. I think that will take putting some of their heads on pikes.
Most unlimited services operate like all you can eat buffets. There is some secondary constraint that keeps usage bounded. I.e. the person's ability to eat food.
> unlimited, should the typical person really expect that to be taken away?
Absolutely. The word "unlimited" has been misused by so many companies (especially ISP and mobile) that anyone who has their eyes open should expect it to mean limited.
Also if there is a deal that is exceeding better than other options, don't be surprised when the rules change later.
Wait, so Google lied about selling an unlimited storage plan and the response is to punish a person for believing them? Sounds to me like the wrong party is being punished here.
Trust in Google might be near zero on HN these days but they still have a pretty good reputation with the general public. Expecting every non-technical user to see through the BS feels pretty wrong to me. I mean, what's the point of consumer protection laws if they don't push companies to be honest?
It was Google who set the price and service limit, not him, so I don’t think there’s any room here to argue that the price he was paying was unfairly low.
He probably wouldn’t have been able to even if he wanted (barring using multiple accounts, which comes with its own problems, including an increased risk of Google taking it as a reason to shut the accounts down).
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-$60?) everyone would know that he should've known this was coming.
It's not at all unreasonable to think a company might offer a service where they make a profit on the average customer, but make a loss in some edge-cases. It's not such an uncommon model.
It's completely unreasonable to expect it to be sustainable. Why wouldn't Google eventually crack down on completely negative value customers?
When you use the actual numbers instead of a theoretical argument it falls apart even quicker. These are message board arguments, not ones you'd make with a straight face in person.
Highly recommend reading the article again, slowly, until you fully understand the situation.
This was a paid service until Google changed the terms; afterwards, Google claimed that the files would merely be read only (indefinitely), not deleted. After THAT, they then gave the user 1 week to deal with 250 terabytes.
It's the only reasonable way to construe what Google said.
If Google unilaterally changed its TOS and updated those terms by saying the account would go 'into a read only state' without any further details (both of which in fact happened), the user is entitled to assume that such a read only state will be the new status quo. Google should have specified a time limit or specified that the read only state would be revocable on with no or short notice, at the company's discretion. By staying silent on that matter, Google's communications were misleading or deceptive or likely to mislead or deceive the user of the product.
I did. I use the term free but it should "incredibly low cost". I accept the blame for my inaccuracy but my position doesn't change. 20$/month for unlimited data that works out to about 0.07$/TB for storage thats pretty damn close to free in my books.
I can only speak for myself in this thread, but my issue was your referring to something that was cheap as free, as if the customer was freeloading. Google is able to leverage probably the greatest economy of scale in the cloud industry (maybe Amazon is better, but that's it) and so its cost per gigabyte of storage is either the lowest or 2nd lowest on the planet. It can and does provide storage services at a very low cost to itself (hence its margins).
It is able to provide services very cheaply and it is for that very reason that paying customers are attracted to it - and of course, even if a service is cheap, paying for a service creates a different relationship between the service provider and the customer than does a relationship where the customer freeloads. In my view, if this had been a free service the terms of which had changed, there wouldn't be the same scope for outrage. But this was a paying customer, even if he didn't pay as much as you think would have been reasonable - or would have been obtained - elsewhere in the market. Google voluntarily chose those prices for its unlimited plan for competitive reasons and in its own corporate interests. That's on Google, as was Google's subsequent unconscionable behaviour.
In Australia, I suspect this sort of behaviour would provoke very close scrutiny by our antitrust and consumer protection regular, the ACCC. We don't seem to have the same problem with regulatory capture that the US does currently. At the very least here the consumer would have arguable claims under the Australian Consumer Law relating to consumer guarantees and misleading and deceptive conduct in trade or commerce.
The offer was unlimited storage at 5+ seats, but in any case, the subject is quoted in the article writing 'I paid Google a lot of money for a long time for a plan,' so it was absolutely not viewed as 'free' to them.
Are you seriously asking this question or are you completely disconnected from the dictionary? What does "unlimited" mean? No limits. If you don't intend for a customer to make use of unlimited storage, with no limits, then use the proper English word.
I hate the 'unlimited' marketing too, but as a user it pays to engage your brain in these situations. Selling a service for significantly less than it costs to run is a risky business strategy, so best case you keep getting great value for some period of time and worst case it's going to change and you'll need to get outta there.
He's not even "abusing" the service like many people would think (storing movies and TV shows, etc). This is all his own data. Yes he has a lot of data. This is why one would pay for an unlimited plan.
Yeah Google made a mistake, being online so long, having a huge legal team. They should know there is 0.1 - 1% users to will conciously or unconciously misuse your system and drive your cost up. Better to have fair use limits from the start.
Also they've been giving out these warnings for months. I'm sympathetic to the guy with the seemingly abusive legal actions from Fox but this storage problem did not just spring from nothing into the final crisis stage.
We had to move a bunch of data off gdrive too, which did little for our opinion of Google's business customer support and was a PITA I didn't need, but the first warnings were in 2002 some time and we were nowhere near as egregious in usage as some of the/r/datahoarder crowd that had multiple petabytes hiding in the lowest cost Gsuite legacy pricing.
>>Also they've been giving out these warnings for months.
That's not true though. They've been telling him that his account is in read-only state. Literally no mention anywhere is made about deletion of the account or data in it, until that very last email which gives him 7 days to move his data(which is unreasonable).
If they said 6 months ago "your account is entering a read only state, if you don't go below your quota it will get deleted in 180 days" I'd consider this entire post to be a waste of space - but that's not what happened, and I'm very sympathetic to his situation.
There are dated messages in the article showing this going back to at least July 2023. So yes, your second case is closer to what appears to have been the sequence of events.
The deleted part doesn't come up until you have seven days.
otherwise it says, verbatim:
Hello,
Your account was previously placed in a 14 day grace period because you exceeded your pooled storage limit.
The pooled storage grace period expired on May 25, 2023 and your account is now in a “read-only” state. In this state services are impacted, including users not being able to upload new files or create new Google Docs, Sheets, Slides or Forms. Learn more about the features that are currently impacted.
To prevent any further disruption to services, you can free up or get more storage.
Sincerely,
The Google Workspace Team
If you just read that there is nothing mentioning it will ever be deleted.
No unfair advantage: if you say “unlimited” then you MUST expect and allow the occasional statistical outlier that uploads 237TB of data.
Otherwise its false advertising.
Edit: the real mistake here is trusting google, a company with a track record in messing up with their customers (from retired products to accounts frozen without any hope of appeal).
I can't even find that they're a tech reporter given that:
> The footage Burke obtained and shared with other journalists was obviously embarassing for the Fox brand. And that’s saying something, considering what Fox is willing to publish and air of its own free will and volition. A pair of videos featuring unreleased footage of a Kanye West interview allegedly illegally obtained by Tim Burke featured the rap star saying things even more abhorrent than his usual blend of sexism, bigotry, and conspiracy theories.
They certainly don't seem like someone with an expert's understanding of cloud storage costs, do you have evidence to the contrary?
Which means ... for either the price of (zero) or (minimum rsync.net) you can move that data at (whatever speeds google <--> aws are capable of).
I am, admittedly, hand-waving away the actual configuration of those "remotes" as they are called, which involve your login and/or API keys, etc. - here is an example of what that config might look like:
I wasn't aware that rclone could create a direct connections and had a quick skim through the documentation where I found this in the FAQ (https://rclone.org/faq/)
----
Can rclone sync directly from drive to s3
Rclone can sync between two remote cloud storage systems just fine.
Note that it effectively downloads the file and uploads it again, so the node running rclone would need to have lots of bandwidth.
----
Oh! That’s very cool, I definitely did misunderstand.
That seems like incredible value for that kind of connectivity. Thank you for broadening my toolset. I can immediately think of a few little projects where such a technique will be useful.
Perhaps they ought to invest in tape drives and (encrypted) offsite backups at friends' homes. If they want convenience of always-available data, they have to pay for that
This still requires Google Drive be able to serve your 237 TB at over 3 gbps for the full 7 days. In my experience this is not the case with cloud storage offerings.
This guy realistically had plenty of time to figure it out without a fancy transfer method though. The real problem is they don't want to pay $$$ for somewhere else to host the files and have now reached the point it has become a problem.
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. He need to get his data out. Trying to get my data out of Google, I've gotten ~1TB out in ~1 week. This is about a year's worth of time to not lose it.
The facts are not "even less inflammatory."
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.