this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
923 points (97.8% liked)

Technology

60073 readers
2964 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] cogman@lemmy.world 151 points 1 year ago (3 children)

but I'm not exactly sure what he was expecting. Storing files is an ongoing expense

He was expecting a company that promised unlimited data to not reneg on their advertised product. Or to simply delete data they promised to store because it's inconvenient for them.

Yeah, it costs money to store things, something Google's sales, marketing, and legal teams should have thought about before offering an "unlimited" product.

[–] Subverb@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reminds me of the guy who paid a million dollars for unlimited American Airlines flights for life. He racked up millions of miles and dollars in flights so they eventually found a way to cancel his service.

[–] zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because he let someone else use it to see a dying family member iirc, which was a breach of contract

[–] Aleric@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Here's an article. It's because he booked under a false name a few times. He had unlimited flights for himself and a companion, it's beyond me why he didn't do everything in his power to not give American Airlines a reason to void his ticket.

Update: here's a really in-depth article written by his daughter that explains everything. Some of it was at American's suggestion!

I went down a rabbit hole. Welcome to my warren.

[–] zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com 5 points 1 year ago

It's a fun rabbit hole

[–] Kbobabob@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm sure he was expecting these things, at least until they notified him of the change. After that it's on him to find an alternative solution. Are you arguing that he was still expecting these things after being notified of the change in service?

[–] cogman@lemmy.world 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm saying that Google should not be allowed to sell a product with an advertised feature to gain advantage over competitors only to later change their mind and remove that feature when they deem it too costly.

A multibillion dollar advertising company should have to support the products they sell.

If you bought a car and one of the features sold was "free repairs for the life of the vehicle" you'd be rightly upset if a year later the dealer emailed you to say "actually, this was too expensive to support so we are cancelling the free repairs, but you can still pay us to repair your vehicle or we'll sell you a new one, aren't we generous!"

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

OP is using a strawman, but it's a reasonable one. In an ideal world, if a company offers unlimited data, then changes its mind, the least they could do is, I don't know, ship the users' data in SD cards for free.

[–] Eezyville@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] twilightwolf90@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

While I agree SD cards are unfeasible, Google Cloud Services offers a Transfer Appliance. MSFT Azure Databox is a mere $350 for a round trip 100Tb NAS freight box. I think that something could have been arranged.

[–] Doug7070@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

This is the crux of it. Should people expect actual unlimited data? Maybe not, if you're tech savvy and understand matters on the backend, but also I'm fairly sure there's a dramatically greater burden on Google for using the word "unlimited". If they didn't want to get stuck with paying the tab for the small number of extreme power users who actually use that unlimited data, then they shouldn't have sold it as such in the first place. Either Google actually clearly discloses the limits of their product (no, not in the impossible to find fine print), or they accept that storing huge bulk data for a few accounts is the price they pay for having to actually deliver the product they advertised.