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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

throwaway2048 3258 days ago

Reposting my comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14716912

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There is a strongly utilitarian argument to not allowing such false statements.

It devalues the products of people that aren't bullshitting you. Say with fake-unlimited the "real limit" is 4TB before they start terminating you, but a different provider provides 5TB of capacity.

Because the former is allowed to outright lie, there is no way for the latter to effectively communicate that they are in fact offering a better product, instead they too have to make a bullshit "fake unlimited" claim to compete. Now because nobody has to actually back their claims with anything, they are infact massively incentivised to cut the "real storage" limits, because it will cut their costs, and they can still keep making the same claims.

Its a market for lemons[1] race to the bottom, and everyone loses, producer and consumer because scamming liars cannot be reliably assessed beforehand. So consumers lose faith in the entire market segment, and providers offering actual legitimate services become unsustainable.

-----------------------------

If you allow sellers to lie about information-opaque things like this, you drive the entire market to a shittier equilibrium, it should absolutely not be allowed.

tinus_hn 3258 days ago

It's like you go to a restaurant that offers unlimited refills and they don't allow you to keep refilling your cup while you're throwing the drinks onto the floor. False advertising!

jackvalentine 3258 days ago

I think you quite clearly know the difference between the two situations. Don't debase yourself.

Except for the fact that when Google, Amazon and the rest talk about "unlimited" they are referring to unlimited PERSONAL storage of data you create as a person, this would include backups of your personal computer, photos, important documents,etc

Not backing up SoundCloud or the entire Internet for $5 a month

mynewtb 3258 days ago

I would love to have my own personal backup of SoundCloud. It's like having a huge library at home, only not limited by physical space.

delinka 3258 days ago

>... only not limited by physical space.

Well, it still kinda is - the physical drives have to live somewhere... ;-)

pavel_lishin 3258 days ago

I didn't create my tax documents, I didn't create the professionally shot photos of my kid, and it's arguable whether it was truly I that created KSP game save files. I definitely didn't create a lot of the work documents that end up living there, either.

> they are referring to unlimited PERSONAL

Actually Google only offers unlimited to business and education accounts, so they're absolutely not referring to personal data.

Jesus H Christ..

People are too f'in litteral, first

Unlimited === Store everything every created

PERSONAL in the context of the discussion would include documents created by a person in general course of business, my point is very clearly and only pedantic trolls do not understand the meaning of point I was attempting to address.

Business use would be for the business that signed up for the service, not for storing an entire copy of SoundCloud

> Business use would be for the business that signed up for the service, not for storing an entire copy of SoundCloud

What if that business is Soundcloud? As far as I can tell, Google places no limits on business users, numerical or otherwise.

supercoder 3258 days ago

This is such a cool idea. Going to backup Soundcloud myself tomorrow !

dexterdog 3258 days ago

So I can backup my computer every day, encrypt the blob and upload it?

rnhmjoj 3258 days ago

Well, companies should think twice before selling unlimited plans. Maybe set a really high cap that's enough to cover 90% of the users but unlimited means unlimited.

dexterdog 3258 days ago

90% would likely be covered by a TB or 2. That would not work for marketing.

wastedhours 3258 days ago

What would work for marketing if you can't compete on the raw number game is framing the amount - like Apple did with "1000 songs in your pocket".

If you want to design a cap - Goog probably has an idea of the kinds of file people store (whether it's pics or docs or videos or sheets etc...), pick a number of those that's impressive and is just lower than what your 10% power users has, and then use that to influence the package size.

2TB of files can easily be turned into "half a million photos" or like their previous ad campaigns, show how it can store every photo from birth to university for your kid or something. Or a love letter every day from first date to goodbye.

If you can't compete on the number, don't compete on the number.

acjohnson55 3258 days ago

I prefer "libraries of Congress" as my storage unit of choice.

captbaritone 3258 days ago

I suppose a new storage unit is in order: "SoundClouds".

_jal 3258 days ago

It is amusing to trace the arguments in this thread. We went from "abusing unlimited storage is why we can't have nice things" to "well, don't call it unlimited if it isn't" to "but marketing doesn't like that".

This is why I so strongly prefer services that don't bullshit me. Tell me what you're exactly selling, for how much[1]. If promise to livestream setting your marketing department on fire, I'll pay double.

[1] If it is free, I already know what it costs and am not interested, thanks.

idbehold 3258 days ago

Over a million megabytes of storage!

brandon272 3258 days ago

Why should the companies think twice? It's the users who end up suffering, not the companies. The companies will just put an end to abusive users or punish everyone uniformly by increasing prices.

rnhmjoj 3258 days ago

The companies suffer too. American Airlines has lost a lot of money with the their unlimited travel pass and I'm not sure they could revoke all the subscriptions after they figure this out.

While this is clearly abusing intent behind the "unlimited" sales pitch, I still do not think it's in violation of it. There's also most likely more than just this guy owning copy of the files from SoundCloud, so once Google has copy of them all they can just cache it for the rest of the people. I.e. you don't need unique files for every user who has some file, instead you can just give out the one to anyone who requests it.

milankragujevic 3258 days ago

Yeah, except people on DataHoarder encrypt their files so that the providers can't store one copy per unique file but have to store one copy per one file in any user's account.

cs2818 3258 days ago

I always encrypt because I worry an automated copyright scan will be the end of my account. If there was a policy that assured my non-shared files wouldn't be subject to these scans I would happily store content unencrypted.

For reference, I don't store pirated content, rather content that I have a license for, but cloud providers have no way of knowing that. Unfortunately the dispute processes are unreliable, so when it's time to backup a media project, I play it safe and encrypt.

0xcde4c3db 3258 days ago

> For reference, I don't store pirated content, rather content that I have a license for, but cloud providers have no way of knowing that.

I'm pretty sure that they just assert that the backup is illegal even if it came from a licensed copy. One argument (used by Nintendo IIRC) is that the official media/servers are too reliable to require backups, and thus anything purporting to be a backup is really for another purpose and thereby not exempt under the statutes authorizing backups.

cuckcuckspruce 3258 days ago

That's pretty uncaring on Nintendo's part. I wonder how many original Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges are destroyed in natural disasters without backup whose owners can only now play ROM dumps of them from the Internet.

My entire Nintendo DS and 3DS cart collection was stolen in a break-in at my place. You can bet that instead of repurchasing I simply bought a flash cart.

cyphar 3258 days ago

You often see that cloud services or streaming services are creating policies and DRM around copyright laws that actually remove freedoms given to you under copyright (fair use for example, or even instances where you have licensed copies).

I wouldn't trust such services to respect your rights in any capacity. In fact, I would argue that the "our incredible journey" trend is a form of property damage (a storage rental place can't just burn their store to the ground with customer's posessions still inside).

IANAL but Google's ToS for copyright seem to be pretty safe so long as you don't share links to copyrighted content https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505

> Respect copyright laws. Do not share copyrighted content without authorization or provide links to sites where your readers can obtain unauthorized downloads of copyrighted content. It is our policy to respond to clear notices of alleged copyright infringement. Repeated infringement of intellectual property rights, including copyright, will result in account termination. If you see a violation of Google's copyright policies, report copyright infringement.

Given that they cater to businesses, I don't think they could do automated scans.

drampelt 3258 days ago

Looks like they do hash matching to automatically scan for copyrighted content: https://torrentfreak.com/google-drive-uses-hash-matching-det...

But they also only did anything with it when the user tried to share it.

Definitely not all. For example the top post of all time (where the guy has 1 Petabyte of videos in Amazon drive) he talks about how only his personal files are encrypted. Then again his videos are recordings of camsites so they might be quite unique

giancarlostoro 3258 days ago

Is there a valid reason for this aside from making sure if they delete it once, they don't delete it everywhere? Now I see the true issue against datahoarders... Wasting more space than needed to account for a situation that their own actions kinda put them under...

apetresc 3258 days ago

I'll go ahead and state the obvious – it's because the vast majority of the files /r/Datahoarders is hoarding is illegal material that they don't want to get ToS'ed for.

rangibaby 3258 days ago

Whyyy?

johnchristopher 3258 days ago

Oooooooh... reminds me of something https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2438181 [How Dropbox sacrifices user privacy for cost savings (dubfire.net)]

LeifCarrotson 3258 days ago

> abuse the shit out of it

It wouldn't be abuse if it was actually unlimited. They uploaded a finite (if large) amount of data to a service advertising infinite capacity.

You know the saying: "you are not wrong, you are just an asshole".

I don't think OP is arguing that it's against ToS or anything like that. He is arguing that if people just upload stuff in these "unlimited" services all willy nilly soon they won't be unlimited anymore. The price will be the same, but they will drop the capacity to something reasonable. Which in turn might hurt some legitimate users.

I'm all for people backing up anything they feel like is necessary, but they just need to know that if they are going to be uploading Tera or even Peta bytes of data to "unlimited" service without paying much for it they are living on borrowed time.

TeMPOraL 3258 days ago

Except they're not an asshole.

Companies should be responsible for what they put in their marketing. If someone calling the bluff on the "unlimited" plan makes them "downsize" the plan to actual ~10TB + $x per Y additional TB, then so be it. It probably doesn't change the reality in any way, and at least the company is no longer lying about its service.

Expect it still might be way lower than 10TB. The unlimited thing, while it might technically be a lie, work on the premise that most users won't have even 1TB of data on the service which lets some outliers have 10s of Terabytes with no problem.

Obviously you are entitled to your opinion and again you are not wrong, false advertising is bad, but again if you are intentionally uploading stuff just to upload stuff be prepared to lose most of it when the limits come crashing down. Like the guy who had/has over Petabyte of video on Amazon if Amazon decides "OK unlimited was an bad idea, let's give everyone 10TB" where is he going to put the rest of this 1014TB of stuff? If the answer is "just let it get erased" then congratulations you are the reason why we can't have nice things.

The problem is they dont downsize to a "reasonable" 10TB, they over correct in the opposite directly like Amazon did, and people that used the service as intended get fucked.

dawnerd 3258 days ago

People were using amazon cloud drive to host their entire plex library and were hammering the service every time plex did a library update.

jackvalentine 3258 days ago

I think there is real damage though, if you let someone advertise 'unlimited' but not deliver.

If my alternative service had a much more reasonable offering with a high limit, that 95% of both companies users data would fit in I'm going to get screwed because I refuse to lie and call it unlimited.

tripzilch 3258 days ago

> You know the saying: "you are not wrong, you are just an asshole".

That's more applicable when the other party is not being wrong by calling a service "unlimited", when it is not.

(and, arguably, assholes when they inevitably take it down with because "oops we didn't mean, like, unlimited unlimited")

smichel17 3258 days ago

I think there's a hole in this reasoning. Because, it seems to me that "legitimate users" is being used to mean "people who are not uploading huge amounts of data" (usually phrased as 'abusing the service'). But then, by definition, imposing a reasonably large cap hurts no legitimate users.

ghaff 3258 days ago

In the terabytes for personal backup these days is pretty reasonable. I think my backup to Backblaze is about 3TB. A lot of that is photos; I have relatively little video.

I agree with your general point though. One thing that helps is that there's a certain throttle because of network bandwidth even if that isn't capped or deliberately throttled.

pweissbrod 3258 days ago

am i wrong?

no youre not wrong.

am i wrong?

youre not wrong walter. youre just an asshole!

all right then.

OzzyB 3258 days ago

It's okay, for everyone one like this, there's 1000's like me that pay for the service and use a fraction of it.

Think of it as we are all contributing to keeping this data safe and available.

That is what they said about Amazon Cloud Drive and every other Unlimited service that came before it right up to the day the Unlimited Service died

throwaway2048 3258 days ago

Heres an idea then, don't make bullshit claims you cant back up.

manigandham 3258 days ago

There never was unlimited service so the only thing that happened is that services became accurately marketed.

dawnerd 3258 days ago

And since the unlimited google drive is 10 a month per user and is targeting large companies, they definitely offset the costs. Now with team drives that helps a lot as not every employee will have a unique copy of a file.

SeanDav 3258 days ago

A car company says: "You can have any colour car you want as long as it is black..."

I am sure there will be people defending the car company as really offering unlimited colours, but obviously they have to restrict it to black, because some clients were unreasonable to expect the company to paint their car Neon Vermilion.

Or to put it another way, "You can have unlimited storage, except that it is limited..."

Nothing is unlimited, it does not exist.

Unlimited is a marketing term used to express simply to the consumer there are not overall limits placed on your storage provided you adhere to the rest of the terms of service.

In the context of data cloud data stroage when Google, Amazon and the rest talk about "unlimited" they are referring to unlimited PERSONAL storage of data you create as a person, this would include backups of your personal computer, photos, important documents,etc

Not backing up SoundCloud or the entire Internet for $5 a month

So if you are a amateur photographer then storing 10TB of photos you took on the service is acceptable, downloading 900TB of music files you do not own, you did no create and have no permission to "as a backup" because the service is going to go under is abuse.

icebraining 3258 days ago

Unlimited is a marketing term used to express simply to the consumer there are not overall limits placed on your storage provided you adhere to the rest of the terms of service.

Which specific clause of the TOS is this violating?

That's your interpretation. Nowhere do they actually claim or imply that you're only supposed to use it for data you create as a person. In fact, it'd be absurd, considering that sharing files is built into the system.

That companies lie to us repeatedly under the guise of "common sense", as if they followed the same standard when applying their unreadable TOSs against us, is bad enough.

Corporations are not your friends, and they won't hesitate to block you if you start becoming a liability. Assuming good faith is absurd, defending it publicly is grotesque.

soundwave106 3258 days ago

Any TOS I've seen from storage companies has clauses against violating local copyright law.

In the United States for instance, making a copy of any digital media is generally illegal, period. The two major exceptions here are if you can prove "fair use", or if you are an archive or library.

"Fair use" is, of course, a very fuzzy term. Fuzzy enough to give companies enough wiggle room to terminate if, as probably most large archives would be, a person uploaded terabytes and terabytes of copyrighted media to their drive. (If said person shares copyrighted links in particular, that usually is explicitly called out in storage TOS clauses... but even if not, I think it would be difficult to claim "fair use" for a personal upload of Soundcloud to your Google drive.)

In the Archive Team's case, it looks like the Archive Team is using the Wayback Machine from archive.org. (http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Dev/Infrastructure) Libraries and archives have their own set of rules allowing limited copying (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/108), in addition to the general "fair use case". My guess is due to questions of Soundcloud's longevity, archiving Soundcloud would qualify.

TeMPOraL 3258 days ago

> Unlimited is a marketing term used to express simply to the consumer there are not overall limits placed on your storage provided you adhere to the rest of the terms of service.

Well, that's doublespeak then, and if someone calls them out on it by actually testing the claim they make, so be it.

I don't understand why people seem not to mind being lied to their faces, as long as it's "just marketing".

>>I don't understand why people seem not to mind being lied to their faces,

Because most rational people use common sense and logic to come to the understanding that when a company is offering you "unlimited" storage for your PERSONAL FILES, they do not intend for you to go out and download SoundCloud as backup in case the SoundClould Service goes under

Just like when a "All you can Eat" buffet does not intend this to mean "All you can eat in your entire life" where by you fill grocery bags full of food to take home with you

dungle6 3258 days ago

All you can eat is actually quite specific, but for knuckleheads like yourself it is usually clarified in writing in other places. It's all you can eat while at the establishment.. not all you can take. They don't advertise it as "unlimited" either as many places in busy markets have a posted time limit. This is clearly part of their terms of service as most buffets I know both clearly state that you can't use takeout containers and many have a posted price for taking out food by the pound or piece. You are not digging yourself further dude.

>>All you can eat is actually quite specific, but for knuckleheads like yourself it is usually clarified in writing in other places. It's all you can eat while at the establishment..

How am I a "knuckle Head" in this situation, when I go to a buffet I eat a normal human portation of food inline with price I am charged for the meal

I do not eat 25 plates full of prime rib for $5.

I do not abuse business simply because "I technically can because it is in the rules"

I fucking hate people that look for these types of technicalities to exploit in society. These types of people are exactly why there are pages of Terms of service, and why we can not have nice things, because people can not be trusted to not abuse shit.

ClassyJacket 3258 days ago

Well then they shouldn't have called it unlimited.