[Spivak]

Can we please dispel this notion that “unlimited” means literally unbounded to the point of absurdity. Seemingly everyone understands that bottomless breadsticks doesn’t mean that Olive Garden literally has infinite breadsticks and that you’re not allow to show up with a semi and tell them to fill it up.

Unlimited means that you don’t have a set quota and as long as your usage doesn’t cross over into genuine abuse of the service that you don’t have to worry about it. If you cat /dev/random into your unlimited storage provider 24/7/365 you can’t really be surprised when they ban you.

[ghaff]

Personally, I'd prefer that companies not use terms that can't be literally true and that obviously must have some limitations to guard against someone who wants to upload data--e.g. high res video--to the cloud constantly.

[salawat]

No... Because that isn't unlimited. Period. The limit in your case is when you decide "usage crosses into abuse of the service". Which means there is no communication ahead of time to the user what behavior to avoid.

Just admit all people want is to be able to ride the gullibility of people who aren't as picky about language as the people who actually give a crap about clear communication. What businesses want to sell is a conditionally vague statistically multiplexed service level, and I'm willing to bet most don't even go out of the way to let the User know what they're overall footprint within the scope of the entire system is, which is info they'd need to manage usage patterns themselves. It's the hallmark of manipulative language.

[im3w1l]

The difference is that there is a common understanding of what unlimited breadsticks means. If you asked people what a "reasonable" amount of unlimited data storage meant, you'd get answers all over the place.

[anoncake]

Unlimited literally does mean unbounded, not "we don't tell you the limit". You cannot abuse a service by using it for its intended purpose. Storing data for possible later retrieval, even exabytes of data, is the purpose of a data storage service.

Storing large amounts of random data merely to waste space might qualify as abuse. But that is a) a strawman as far as I can tell and b) it isn't always possible to tell apart random and encrypted/compressed data apart anyway.