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
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
Over a decade ago, I pointed out that as Google kept trying to worm its way deeper into our lives, a key Achilles’ heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ev…
You're viewing a single thread.
Lot of didn't-read-the-article-itis in here. FBI seized his physical storage, cloud was the only option for the journalist and it did not make financial sense to pay for multiple cloud backups. Google is entirely the bad guy here.
Well, he did ignore that he wasn't paying for storage for half a year and did nothing to prevent data loss. Even ignored the grace period. That is at least negligent.
He assumed that Google assured him that his current data would be safe. But saying that your account will move into read only mode doesn't equate to keeping those much TBs of data on server forever.
Though I have a question. Was this unlimited service that Google offered was a one time payment thing(seems unlikely, since only couple of cloud providers like pCloud do so and that too on a much lesser scale) or a recurring subscription thing? If it was the later, then it is naive to believe that a for profit corporation would keep that much data without raking in money.
Iirc it was a subscription, but I could be wrong. Having unlimited data with a one time payment doesn't sound like a Google thing to do. There are running costs.
Presumably it was GSuite/Google Workspace. While they advertised unlimited storage if you paid for 5 accounts, it wasn’t really enforced so you could pay something like $20/month and get unlimited storage on G-drive. There was a daily cap on how much data can be moved, but that’s fine for hosting incremental backups like many that took advantage.
Well, google And the fbi
It sounds more like "Oh no, someone took your files? Well, you should upload everything you have to our server. Include anything we, I mean they, might have missed the first time. We'll keep it safe. You can totally trust us not to send your data to anyone, just like we recently got caught doing...again."