> “I am unreasonably sad about using almost all of my free google storage. Felt infinite. Please don’t make me pay! I need U gmail googledocs!,” one person tweeted in September.
Will journalists PLEASE stop taking tweets from any rando out there and publishing them as "news". Yes, with hundreds of million of users you can basically find any quote you want to back up your pet theory.
I feel like I should just open a bunch of twitter accounts and post things like "Journalist X is a complete idiot" and then write an article about how the whole world thinks Journalist X is incompetent, with low and behold all these tweets to back it up!
It's the equivalent of local news on the spot interviews. They always look for the dopiest idiots because it makes for great TV. For some reason online they've gone the other way and try and use them as a legitimate source. The habit of using @fuckstick as a source needs to die off.
I showed up at the scene of a (small) plane crash yesterday hoping to go for a hike. Wasn't sure what the fuss was about, so pulled my phone out to check local news. Within seconds, a reporter for a local news channel was tapping on my window. I rolled it down, he told me there was a plane crash, and asked if I'd like to share my thoughts on camera.
Um, no? How could I _possibly_ have anything intelligent to say about this?
And then it hit me... this is why local news is so crazy. Because the people who end up interviewed on TV are the types of people who _don't_ realize they have nothing intelligent to say, or who are self-absorbed enough to want to get on TV however they can.
I'm always astonished (slow learner or beginner's mind, you decide) at the Q&A Amazon section Amazon offers for its products when I see how many "I don't know" answers there are. Someone posts a question, "Does it list an artificial sweetener as one of its ingredients?", and several people will always answer, "I'm sorry, I don't know," "I have no idea, I don't own this product" etc. What?! Do all of these people somehow imagine that every posted request for info is being personally directed at them? Are these the people I'm standing in line with at the DMV? Do they all think I'm the crazy one? (Am I?)
Juxtapose this with the local news interviews and it all makes a strange sort of sense....
Yes, because Amazon emails those questions to you directly if you've bought the product before. Sometimes the questions are very specific, thus "I don't know"
To be fair the crazy Amazon responses are at least partially due to Amazon[1] but I do think it's still kind of nuts to respond. I always picture my Grandma as the person answering because she seems to think every email has been sent with as much thought and care as a hand written letter.
Interesting r/mildlyinfuriating thread[2] about it.
"They climbin' in yo windows"
"Whistle tips go woo woo"
"Ain't nobody got time for that"
"they had us the first half, I'm not gonna lie"
Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker
etc
Are you sure all those people wanted their 15 minutes? I think at least some of them were genuinely responding to reporters, and it was society that turned their behaviors into phenomena.
Maybe, I"m just trying to come up with some read that's more charitable than "they're all too stupid to know they don't have anything intelligent to say"...which is basically what OP was saying.
Bingo! That's why Twitter is so distopian: they can craft any narrative by choosing which tweets to show in your timeline. The ultimate out-of-context quoting machine. 140 character limits was set in place for a reason.
gp is complaining about third parties quoting tweets out of context. When Twitter's raison d'être is out of context quoting. He saw trees, I'm glad to point at the whole forest.
gp wasn't talking about tweets being taken out of context. they were talking about reporters using an entire tweet from a random person to support a random theory.
it seems like your beef is with twitter generally, but gp (at least by my reading) was more complaining about the journalists that rely on it in this particular way, not the underlying platform.
I agree that twitter is a cesspool and does not encourage thoughtful communication, but it feels a little forced to me in this conversation.
It’s not new. I had a few journalist friends in the 90s they would call or email every once in a while saying “I’m looking for a quote for xyz” and then get one and print or reference it on air.
All these random joe quotes are stupid and I wish editors would stop it.
Slightly unrelated, but why do people like Colbert indulge Trump's twitter so often as if it's big news whenever he needs to take a deuce and thumbs out some text? I love Colbert but damn, do we really need to hear Trump's tweets read out-loud every day by multiple talking heads and talk-show hosts? That just feeds the beast.
At least Trump is president, so his words mean more than random idiots. How much more they mean isn't clear, but his position means knowing what he thinks is sometimes important regardless of your opinion on the topic.
You can argue that Trump's tweets got more attention than they were worth before he was president.
Journalists have been doing this in other forms for a long time. See TV news taking random interviews with whomever in the parking lot during an event.
This morning I made breakfast and left for work without eating it.
Even I came to the realization that if you don't pay for something you are a disposable, interchangeable asset to be exploited.
$4.25 per month gets me 25GB at Fastmail.
$1.08 per month gets me a domain name at Namecheap.
$5.33 per month gets me an email address with no ads and no tracking, support when things go wrong, and an email address that is my actual name at a .com address that sounds respectable.
If fastmail goes bad? All of my emails are on my computer. I just switch providers and I can keep the same address.
If namecheap goes bad? I move my domain name to another service.
There are step-by-step easy-to-follow tutorials on how to do what I did that are so simple to implement that even someone who left their bowl of oatmeal on the kitchen counter this morning and is really hungry at work could follow them.
If something isn't worth spending $5.33 per month on, is it really that important?
I don't pay for HN. If they started screwing with their users, or started charging for the service I would move on and certainly wouldn't write articles claiming that YC hooked me then hung me out to dry for cash.
As an American, I also don't trust the American Government to not compel Google to provide them access to my data. Yes, I know I am supposedly protected by due process- but Barr is making it explicitly clear that the 4th amendment does not apply to our digital lives.
I was paying for G Suite earlier this year with my custom domain and was very happy with it (especially cloud search), except: I have been using GMail since almost 3 years before it became public and there was no way to merge my old persona with the new G Suite account. I had to switch my Google identities back and forth. I decided that this was too much of a hassle.
Do you use Chrome? You can do all your personal stuff in one Chrome profile, and all your G Suite stuff in another. You can even use both profiles simultaneously (though in separate windows).
You may also want to consider only using your G Suite account for G Suite features. Certain features designed for personal Google accounts don't work properly for G Suite accounts (like Youtube/Google Play Music family plans).
> If namecheap goes bad? I move my domain name to another service.
Not exactly. Namecheap has notoriously flagged people's accounts for no reason as suspicious. Mine was flagged for simply for updating my password with one that I generated from a password-generator. They wouldn't respond, and when they did they said that my account was flagged do to suspicious activity that they felt was legitimate. It took me over a week to finally unlock my account, but that wasn't until I had to take the issue to social media with screen shots.
Mine is. And it's all 2FA'd up. That was a part of the "Take Responsibility for your Own Stuff: For Dummies" guide I followed.
I imagine it would be easier to socially engineer a cellphone store employee and get a SIM to do a SMS-based password reset for a Google/Microsoft/Apple email account than it would be to hijack my domain.
I have the exact same service providers and quite frankly, I love them. Haven’t had any issues, setup and payment is a piece of cake. And their app is a proper professional email app.
It sure is interesting sitting back watching your average consumers purchase chromebooks and nexus phones only to have their subsidies be pulled.
Chrome books with the baked in eol, and cloud storage cut in half was a pretty evil moment. Curious to see what the future has for the customers who have become the product.
This article seems awfully doom and gloom. I find that:
- Google provides really good tools for archiving your data. If you want to reduce your storage footprint, you can use Google Takeout to grab it, archive it somewhere else, and then clean up items you no longer want. I recently did this with my photos, I knew I had some huge videos that had been uploaded that I didn't need (I had edited them into a Youtube video), so I was able to find and delete them and open up quite a bit of space. I toyed with the idea of deleting photos 5 years old, once I archived them, but I didn't need to because of the above.
- Google provides a lot of value to me for the $3/month I've been spending. Photo enrichment and searching is something I use all the time. Storage of my documents and files is very useful and google has been super reliable.
I found it good value until they removed local syncing of Google Photos from their Gdrive client. That was where most of my data was. Making it only accessible via a web form download was a huge product downgrade that I don't think a more customer-responsive company would have risked. So I cancelled my subs & won't be going back (I'm sure they're quaking in their billionaire boots).
It's particularly infuriating because it was such a poorly-motivated change. Customers supposedly found the interaction with Google Drive confusing, so rather than improve ergonomics, they cretinously remove a lynchpin feature altogether. I still haven't found a really good alternative.
I'm running a program which downloads any new photos to my computer. I'm away from my PC right now but I'm pretty sure it was this: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner
Thanks - that's new to me. I'll check it out (though on the face of it I'm not entirely keen to start paying Google again for a service they treat this badly).
I had the same feeling. I now use Dropbox in conjunction with iCloud photos, time machine and backblaze. I wasn’t a huge fan of the google drive client, but I loved insync (not affiliated, just a fan) since it worked on Mac/windows/Linux.
I tried out one drive before going to Dropbox and had huge issues withy the client on my Mac, my windows box, and just in general. The selective sync support was atrocious and kept getting into conflicts with the directories on the drive and refusing to sync then duplicating folders.
I also checked out iCloud Drive, but there’s no selective sync option and there’s some large directories I keep in cloud storage that I don’t need on my laptop.
Agree on OneDrive - I was on Windows when I tried it, and found it a terrible mess of a service: at once highly invasive and yet lacking in capabilities. Dropbox is out of the question for me for political/ethical reasons. I've half-seriously considered writing something of my own, though the impulse wears off pretty fast when I start to think through the implications.
> If you want to reduce your storage footprint, you can use Google Takeout to grab it,
This is what I'm doing to migrate my data over to Microsoft's offering (I get adfree mail and 1TB + office products that work offline). I'm just waiting for Microsoft to let me use a domain without GoDaddy, so I can use the email, but I'm more likely to use it for storage.
Second that, I paid for extra storage as I want to save full resolution images.
Currently getting 2TB for $99 a year that good lets me share with my family, is a no brainer and good value.
It's great. I have the 100GB level, mostly for pictures being backed up automatically at full resolution.
It is a bummer though, that their tiers go from Free (10GB), 100GB, 200GB, then up to 2TB. That's a huge jump!
Why not have a 500GB, and a 1TB tier?
They could probably get more people to pay them for storage if they offered a 50GB tier at $0.99 like Apple does for iCloud.
The 10GB free tier up to 100GB is a large jump too, and $1.99 a month might be just a little over the threshold for those that don't really use that much data but want phone backups and some pictures, etc.
This is especially curious coming from the company that does Google Fi, charging for data by the GB used, and crediting back portions of GBs unused, and also capping the monthly charge.
The 200GB/$3/mo to 2TB/$10/mo jump doesn't seem so bad to me. That's a dramatically lower per GB price ($0.015 -> $0.005). But then above 2TB it goes back up ($0.01), but worse is if you use 3TB, it's still $100/mo (that's over 3 cents a GB!)
I use backblaze for most of my bulk data storage (0.005/GB/mo).
The nice part about the google storage is your Android phone can make automatic use of it. If you're just doing cloud storage from a computer or something, Backblaze can make sense.
Exactly! Suppose you live for another 100 years. At the current rate, Google will be giving you the rest of your life with this for $300. You should just be hoping it remains this cheap.
It's a charge per month at $2-$3. The lowest annual plan costs $19.95 USD.
My heartburn is Gmail was rolled out as near infinite storage. They told you archive, not delete. And for a while they had a ticker at the bottom showing your storage increasing over time. The cost is modest, but I feel Google isn't being true to the spirit of Gmail when they limit and charge for email storage.
I remember that ticker, felt neat. When it disappeared I assumed it was a sign Google had enough textual data to mine. Similar with their handling of photos hence free down sampled storage.
Throwing my voice in I now pay. It is worth the price to keep high resolution photos of my kids with effortless sync from my wife's phone.
Which it won't. Which is kind of the point the author is making (just instead of "free" in this case it's "3$")
While I do not feel that restricting Gmail and their other data collection tools to paying customers is in Google's long term plan, the potential of random price bumps on a highly integrated, wide ranging and very much closed product experience like the Gsuite certainly creates a problematic power dynamic.
My wife ran into the storage problem and got warning messages. Despite significant tinkering I couldn't find any way to get any kind of storage report. Once they split gdrive and gphotos there's no API, there's no report, and you can't sort by size.
I'm all for paying for a service, but it does seem rather underhanded to claim someone is using X GB of storage, but making it near impossible for them to see what is actually using that storage.
So that shows the totals. My google photos is where most of my storage is. Turns out I have 10.22GB shown at that URL, but actually 134GB of photos. Some covered by the various promises made to pixel 1, pixel 2, and pixel 3 owners.
There's no way to show the largest photo/video, no way to tell which photo is covered by which storage promise, and no way to help manage that space.
So basically it's a trap.
I likely have some hour or two video that's a big chunk of my storage, but you can't sort by size or video length.
Indeed, I'm learning towards downloading the 134GB and doing it all myself. I'm learning towards digikam for organization (tagging, cropping, organizing, etc) and then using one of the upload methods to something like piwigo (self hosted or a service). That way I have control, can have it backed up, and won't have to endure the random changes google has been making.
The weirdest of which is that pixel 4 prices are higher than expected (even higher than Apple!) and they are dropping the free backup full quality photo backups.
I dunno. It's really hard to find out an overview what are you actually using the storage for. I had google backup enabled and forgot about it - it's really not obvious to find the UI. Then I disabled it and deleted it - it was about 4GB and my used space went down by 400MB.
You also can't find out how much storage a folder on google drive is taking up. And don't even get me started on Photos.
That's nice for drive, but doesn't include any photos/video in photos.google.com.
So basically you have a single google storage pool that's reported at the bottom of the gmail.com interface. But now you can't use any of the google drive related tools to see what is consuming all your storage.
The photos.google.com is time based, so it's very hard to see what your largest files are.
Do you mean
https://one.google.com/storage
? That gives just a general overview - photos are this much, drive this much.
How much space does this folder take? What is the largest video? How much space do old photos take? All trivial to answer on a local disk, impossible to do in Google's account.
Hah. Takeout is neat, but it doesn’t seem to include any of the ad tracking data google have on me. Emails, videos, files: yes. URLs I’ve been tracked to that influence which ads I’m served: nope.
I recently found it easier to find an old music video I’d made by using takeout to download my YouTube archive, rather than figuring out which sub identity of which linked account I had used to upload the private video.
I love the irony of this: I open the article and start reading. I am told that Google lured us in w/ free storage, but now I'm going have to pay since I've used so much storage. Then, a popup is overlaid on the article and the text is hidden. The popup says this article isn't actually free. I've read too many free articles on Bloomberg and now I'm going to have to pay for a subscription to keep reading.
I don't know what to take away from this other than the reminder that every public company has a duty to shareholders to take people's money! That's the function of a company: profit. What do we really expect here?
I agree that it's ironic/hypocritical. I disagree strongly that we should simply expect it. Consumer attitude is a real component of capitalism, so it's self-fulfilling to encourage silence under the theory that we can't affect anything.
I would be more than happy to pay for gmail, google docs, and an entire suite of google products with the absolute guarantee legally that they could not and would not either collect, or sell my information as part of that payment.
I highly doubt that would ever happen though, considering data is the new oil.
It's already possible by moving from a consumer Google account to a G Suite account.
The main difference between consumer Google accounts and G Suites accounts is that G Suite accounts come with an extremely comprehensive (complex, complicated) administration panel which is absolutely overkill for use cases other than managing G Suite users within a company / organization.
But, you can sign up for G Suite as an individual, and most of the default settings will just work out of the box without much customization needed.
You will have issues if you want to use things like Google Home or Google Nest (or any other consumer-only services... Nest thermostats, for example, won't connect to G Suite accounts and only connect to regular Google consumer accounts).
Here's Google's guarantee re: legally not collecting / selling your G Suite data...
> There is no advertising in the G Suite Core Services, and we have no plans to change this in the future. Google does not collect, scan or use data in G Suite Core Services for advertising purposes. [1]
>> There is no advertising in the G Suite Core Services, and we have no plans to change this in the future. Google does not collect, scan or use data in G Suite Core Services for advertising purposes. [1]
To me that reads a lot like 'Google does indeed collect, scan, use, read, algorithmically process, mine, analyze, characterize, handle, refine, derive from, and peruse data in G Suite Core Services, but with the primary purpose of doing other stuff with it than direct advertising.'
Sorry, if that's actually not fair this time, but with all the doublespeak about these things for the last decade and a half or so, hedging like that does not inspire confidence.
Yep, that was exactly my take as well. The statement from Google sounds good at a glance, but absolutely leaves open the possibility that they use the data for 100 other things that aren't _directly_ related to advertisement targeting, but that users might be concerned about.
I'm inclined to think I just added some honesty.
When they've used it in their 'research and development to better understand your preferences and offer you better services' or whatnot, do you seriously believe that isn't to interact with ad targeting and all the other ways they use the models?
Aspersions aside you have a point about the risk for confirmation bias, but that goes for conserving overly credulous attitudes as well.
Everyone can make up their own minds about how to fill the blanks in how Google really handles this data but the track record isn't great for straightforward honesty there.
Currently. And no current plans to change in the future. But they could change their plans. It's not a "no advertising as long as you keep paying", it's "no advertising as long as we feel like it."
Well, yeah, there's spam detection and similar features that are enabled by not having client-side encryption. If all of the features that are enabled by cloud-based email aren't worth it to you, fine, but most people like them and you have other options.
The “you have other options” closing is unproductive, but I concur that there are plenty of valid (useful) reasons to analyze customer data. Additional features: phishing and virus detection, suspicious account activity, building private search indexes, cataloging photos by vision results, and using user feedback to correct models.
Hmm, I will need to do a bit more research into this.
My only concern is what exactly is the extent of "G Suite Core Services", does that apply to all existing features of Google, the entire entity itself including YouTube/etc, or just the services provided by the G Suite.
I still may do this but if it doesn't include search, YT, etc, it will be a bit disappointing knowing they are double dipping with my subscription and data.
Do you have a source or have other info on this? I have a G Suite Non-Profit account and while it says the "my drive" had 30 GB of storage, the non-profit license also grants us "shared drives" which grant unlimited storage but only in those shared drives. I was wondering if the 1 TB limit is a similar situation.
>the absolute guarantee legally that they could not and would not either collect, or sell my information as part of that payment.
I don't think that's a strong enough requirement. Google doesn't sell your information (it's too valuable for them to do that). Instead, they use it to profile you for better targeting. So them not selling your information doesn't mean much. The same goes for not "collecting". Even if they don't fingeprint or location track you, they still have access to all your emails which is still a treasure trove of information. You can't tell them not to collect it because they need to to operate a mail service.
The only acceptable solution in my mind is end to end encryption.
I'm actually really interested to see Google start charging for things instead of the usual cycle of spinning things up and shutting them down when the business model isn't there. I'd much rather pay 100$ a year for their services if it would guarantee their availability, and reduce the pressure to commoditize my data.
Am I going to pay $100/year for the same services and still get ignored when I get locked out of my account? Enterprise users already pay for Google services. It seems like recourse for them is no different than a free tier user (aside from blowing up on Twitter/Reddit/HN). Why would anyone want to pay for that?
It seems like the most reliable support system with Google is to have a SWE friend who works there who will document and enter tickets for you, which is completely absurd for a company of their size.
It's been a few years, but the school where I worked used Google Apps for Education, and when I called for support they were always pretty helpful. Has that deteriorated recently?
They'll be helpful until your whole organization gets shut down for "abuse". What kind of abuse? They won't tell you. No human will talk to you.
Microsoft does the exact same thing with O365. Even knowing people at Microsoft and getting tickets internally escalated and re-escalated, it took me far too long to get things unlocked, and I never got an answer on what caused it. A week later, I was locked out again. Same routine. Finally got back in, and a bunch of music that I had legally purchased from 7digital and stored in OneDrive was mysteriously missing. During the whole process, as soon as anyone you talk to sees the state of your account, they'll refuse to continue talking. You have to fill out a generic form, and you don't receive a response. Either your account gets unlocked an indefinite amount of time later, or it doesn't.
All the major cloud providers seem to operate that way.
Isn't the business model there: analyze the data uploaded and use it to enrich targeting. This is what they've done with every other free product. Maybe when we pay outright that will stop?
1. It is great that Google is working to come up income sources other than ads. This will help diversify their business and motives over time.
2. This may cause some to think that the money is the only method of payment for the service that's happening. That payment via our data isn't happening because money is involved. I hope this does not happen.
3. It opens the door for competitors who want to charge for a service. If Google can charge this gives some emotional motivation for others to do it instead of harvesting and selling data. It's a tiny thing and a bit part but still a thing.
4. This is telling that Google isn't making enough money on this data to justify storing more of it. What does this say about enough for them? How much data do people want to store and what would it mean?
I'll stop at 4 things. I hope people wonder down these different paths that are not mutually exclusive.
Given that search data is not very valuable after 3 months I suppose the other data is less valuable after the same time. This may prompt some users to help google out by deleting their old less valuable data when they get near their limits, or if not they may help Google out with some money for storing old data that otherwise is not valuable for Google.
Short version: Google is offering paid plans for people who exceed the ample free 15GB of storage. There is so much to criticize Google for, but asking for money in exchange for a service is not one of them.
Yeah weren't people complaining about how they've been suffocating a lot of industries (like mapping, email) by offering so much for free subsidized by search ads.
There seem to be three broad generations--by adoption, weakly correlated with age--of internet-savvy people.
1: People who were very active in the BBS/Usenet days and saw the emergence of the public Internet and web.
2: People (like me) who mainly got on when the .com bubble was warming up. People in 1 and 2 saw or even had these complaints, and had plenty of skepticism about ad driven models when they emerged with the growing realization at Google and other surviving web companies that ads and data mining could save them after the crash.
3: People who only know the internet after that. Who never knew a time when the internet was such a big, new thing that people still capitalized the word.
I think most of the people who complain about companies charging for stuff are in 3 and never knew what we lost when ad-funded silos pushed everything else out. It doesn't help that a lot of them are, along with 2 and even 1, struggling to make enough money to survive with so many jobs turned into SaaS or taken over by big outsourcing firms that don't need as many people.
The journalist is not clear on where the line is here. From what I can tell, I still have my 15Gb of free storage linked to my Gmail account. It looks like this is linked to storage associated with legacy Chromebook accounts which originally came with 200Gb of free storage and now they have to pay for that data.
There's a linguistic ambiguity in the part of the op here. What is "mining"?
Is spam filtering mining? Is indexing for search (in Gmail) mining? Is sticking flights on your calendar (and nothing else) mining?
Mining sounds nefarious. Are analysis of emails for the consumer still mining? If they are, and any scanning of emails is bad, why use Gmail? To me at least, it's value is the stuff it does for me.
What part of "We do not scan for advertising purposes in Gmail or other G Suite services. Google does not collect or use data in G Suite services for advertising purposes." is ambiguous?[0]
But that's Gsuite, what about consumer Gmail?
"G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization, and Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail service. Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change"[1]
Where is that? I get redirected to the general Google privacy page from within free Gmail.
I could read that as for only paid Gsuite Gmail, not free Gmail.
As an aside the "what part of..." leader in your reply comes across as rude. The resources you are citing aren't an easy find from within free Gmail. And they aren't in the privacy policy, so what I said remains true.
"Google does not use keywords or messages in your inbox to show you ads. Nobody reads your email in order to show you ads."
Google's privacy policies are written to be understandable by lay-people. Describing the specific breakdowns of what things they aren't doing can be intimidating or scary. So they don't. But the information you care about is still there, unless you're assuming some weird level of linguistic runaround.
See my edit, the privacy policy doesn't contradict either. (and if memory serves, the actual Gsuide corp privacy policy is a legalese pdf somewhere, that does make these things explicit)
If this is true how does Google know about my flight details for example? Is it client side Android code or does the information get to the server side in a database decrypted?
Also if Google doesn't need my emails, can you tell me why Google is behind other companies in end-to-end encryption of emails? I'm sure many people would like to have it as a feature (even if it makes searching these emails server side impossible)
Wait... What!? Okay, I'm admittedly ignorant of the technical details of email, but I thought "an email" was just some text (with encoding specified), some internet headers, and maybe a binary blob representing an attachment. Basically, what you see if you "view original" in Gmail. Is there additional meta data that makes up an email? Like, outside of the content "container" part of the email (similar to how image meta data is saved in the EXIF part of a JPEG file, but isn't part of the image itself)? Sorry if I phrased that dumbly.
They referred to such schemas like "FlightReservation"[1] for flights, "EventReservation"[2] commonly used for movie tickets, or "LodgingReservation" used for hotel bookings. The specific supporting website encodes your reservation in these formats inside the confirmation email, and Gmail picks up on that. (IIRC it used to scrape emails for that data, but most of it if not all is done via schemas nowadays)
I believe your statement is incorrect. While it may no longer scan emails for direct ad serving purposes, I believe emails are still scanned for other purposes.
For example, I remember running across a purchase history page a while back that had saved purchase history data based on email confirmations in gmail. IIRC, it was from specific sellers like Amazon going further back than my gmail history, which I periodically purge. I never wanted/enabled this 'feature' and saw no way to disable or delete the purchase history. Maybe this stopped, maybe it didn't, but this game of whack-a-mole with Google has gotten tedious.
Even if we take that post to mean they don't ever look at the content of your email at all (I don't see that), can you tell us who independently verifies that claim? Or should we just trust Google because, hey, a large corporation would never lie to anyone or try to abuse the fine print of a user agreement.
How do you arrive at the list [0] I can view in my account details, that shows all purchases ever made with my gmail account (a feature i cannot disable)?
How else does your employer arrive at this aggregated/filtered dataset? Oneiromancy?
"Google does not read your emails for the purpose of directly targeting ads" is a wildly different and much more accurate statement than "Gmail stopped reading your emails".
Google promises exactly that for G Suite accounts, see https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650 for more details. However, there is a trade-off that some services won't work with G Suite accounts, as they weren't changed to not track.
If you read between the lines, it looks like that they still "create advertising profiles" if you're a gsuite user. They repeatedly state they don't "scan [...] for advertising purposes", but they only mention not creating advertising profiles under gsuite for education. My interpretation is that they might not be scanning your emails, but they're still building a dossier on you.
Migrating from Google Drive/One is to something like Nextcloud or a personal NAS is very easy. Just install the desktop application, mount your NAS or other cloud provides storage, and use your favorite synchronization tool to sync the data.
I’ve done this before with Nextcloud and a QNAP NAS and it couldn’t be easier. I highly recommend taking the governance of your data seriously. If you don’t you may end up losing everything without knowing it.
A personal NAS doesn't have the seamless backup of cloud storage. IMO your hardware is much more likely to fail than you are likely to get locked out of your Google account, even if the latter happens to some people. And even if you have backups, now you need to buy new hardware, reinstall, restore, while life is still going on, and during which your data is unavailable. I'd love to not depend on a huge cloud provider but I haven't found a DIY solution that matches the convenience and seamlessness. There are a few rare could sync products that claim client side encryption (SpiderOak, ResilioSync & Tresorit) but they're not fully integrated with Chromebooks, Android and/or iOS. (Right now I'm using a jury-rigged combination of SpiderOak for backup and Resilio Sync for sync, but it's kind of a hack. This is not a compensated endorsement, LOL.)
OTOH if you get locked out of your BigG account and you don't have a backup elsewhere, you are screwed for good.
So, I'd treat HW failures and account closures on the same level. You just have to think about the possibilities in your specific case: which HW are you willing to invest on VS how you are going to behave with your Google account.
When my wife was having issues with OneDrive I built a small tool which used the API to back up all the files to an external drive, avoiding the OneDrive sync system entirely. Worked quite well. I imagine similar things might be useful for people wanting to back up other cloud accounts.
You can do a Google Takeout but that's huge and therefore painful to do frequently.
>A personal NAS doesn't have the seamless backup of cloud storage>
Synology has various plug-in's/apps that with either synchronize with cloud storage options (i.e. DropBox, OneDrive, etc.) - or backup to cloud storage.
(No, I am not shilling, just been a happy customer of theirs for about 7-years, store about 20tb on my local 5-bay NAS)
In the case of email, you've not only got to back it up into a usable form but remove the old ones from gmail in order to get the free space back. And then it's no longer in your gmail interface.
How to expand the storage though? I want to be able to buy random drives and add them to the server. RAID and ZFS require identical drives: if I buy a 2 TB drive and a 4 TB drive, the 2 TB difference would be unused. In order to expand the capacity properly, I'd have to replace all the disks one by one with new 4 TB disks as if the old ones had failed. This process requires rebuilding the array and the chance of getting an uncorrectable read error is considerable.
you add all the disk and replicate on all four the 2T partition, then remove the old disk then extend the partition. this is significantly easier if it all started with lvm on top of the raid but not impossible without.
Is iCloud really that lucrative? It's $9.99/month for 2TB - that's roughly 1/4 the price you'd pay for that much storage on "normal" S3, for example, or about what you'd pay for S3 glacier storage, not including transfer costs.
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is about the same price as iCloud, but also charges for downloads.
Since Backblaze is profitable (as far as I know?), presumably Apple are making money off iCloud storage, but I'm still not sure if I'd use the word "lucrative" here.
>Is iCloud really that lucrative? It's $9.99/month for 2TB - that's roughly 1/4 the price you'd pay for that much storage on "normal" S3
...assuming you use exactly that much. If you use something like 250GB, it's twice the price as s3. If you check the offerings[1], there's a gap in the 200GB-2TB range. I suspect that's to force "average users" (in the 200GB-1TB range) into paying more than they need, while giving the appearance of being competitive (if you use all 2TB, which most won't).
The funny thing about consumer cloud storage is it's only useful if you aren't using all of it. Stuff just automatically showing up there is the point. If it's full, that doesn't happen.
In old days, when hit by dreaded mailbox size exceeded notification, in Outlook I always used to sort mails by size and remove the attachments - which used to be the only culprit in mailbox bloat.
Go through top 10-20 mails, and you are set for another year or so before you hit the mailbox limit again. Rinse and repeat.
I know it's not what you're asking for and if someone tells me one more time "why would I need to sort when I can just search?" I will probably shout something rude at them.
But, do you know about their search options? You can use "size:5MB" for example to find emails over 5MB. This is what I do when I find I need to, as you say, trim the bloat.
You can search by size in gmail in the web site. Also, you can connect any pop/imap email client and sort by whatever you want. Even if you don't want to use Thunderbird full time, spend 10 minutes once a year to get it connected and do some mailbox cleaning and you can pretty much solve this problem.
Alternatively, you can just archive off X years off mail and store it off of gmail. That way if you ever need it you can always dig it up.
I think you can use a IMAP client like Thunderbird to clean it up.
(I say "think" because while I use a gmail account in my email client, I only use it to receive notifications from Google, so no wild folder/tags setup, and I never check the webmail to see if it matches the emails I see in Thunderbird)
Yes you can. You can go to the "All Mail" folder, add the "Size" column to the list view (right click the columns) and then proceed to sort every email by size.
I've found their prices very reasonable and worth the cost for roughly 50GB in business and family related photos, with a healthy margin left for growth in storage needs.
One of the complaints, in the article, is not like the others. The people that have been buying Pixel phones, expecting to have unlimited storage, to find out with the latest device Google forces your content to be compressed, do seem to have been tricked. If there's an expectation there, they have the duty to disclose it.
It's difficult to figure out how storage is used in gmail. I downloaded my data and did a little analysis, summarized here: https://i.imgur.com/x6yQBQu.png.
As of that time, my mailbox was using 17GB (14GB of which are in one long-running thread), and 900MB of that was email reply quotes. Google refuses to provide an option to disable email quotes, which are completely useless in an email thread of all gmail accounts.
I want my 900MB of free storage back, dammit!
Also, there's no way (AFAIK) to delete images attached to emails, while keeping the messages.
I think the article forgets that Google is a business and they have an intrinsic motivation to make money. IMHO Google provides a ton of software at no charge to customers (I know, ads). Moving to a consumption-based pricing model w/ a generous free tier means that only the users who use Google's services the most end up paying for it.
Also, $20/yr for 100GB seems like a steal. I use G Suite even for my personal email but even on my longest-standing account with almost a decade of history I am only using 20GBs with the majority of that being photos.
The problem here is not that Google started charging people for their services
The problem here is not the question if Gmail is good or not.
The problem is that they subsidized their Gmail and other services in order to get rid of small competitors and once they have a large market share, they will make most of their services paid. It will take time, it will be slow but it's going to happen.
And they use their large market share to keep all of the small independent mail providers and self-hosted email servers in check by marking their emails as spam.
Yeah, this is basic capitalism but pretty scummy nonetheless. Having an email address for a decade makes it incredibly difficult to change. The one "bright" spot is actually that Gmail isn't very good; other than the massive pain updating the world about your move there isn't much to lose.
When GMail started, they claimed that I'd never need to delete emails and I could always just archive them. I knew that claim was too good to be true, but I figured it'd be a long time before I really needed to worry about it.
Drive now exists and takes up more of that space, but I'm still comfortably away from my limits.
I'm not upset about eventually having to pay for storage, but I was and am upset about their claim that it would never be necessary.
This has become the pattern. Buying into something on the basis of a value proposition only to have it consistently changed from under you without any recourse. It's a bait-and-switch and that's why it's upsetting.
It's perfectly reasonable to charge for these services and what they are suggesting to charge -- if I were still a Google customer. But that's not how it was sold to everyone. How many competitors did they drive out by taking this approach and undercutting this way for so long?
I've had large corporate email environments in my portfolio for about half of my career. As recently as 2017, ~2-3% of a 200k org of those users would exceed the free GMail tier in terms of storage. I don't have the stats in front of me, but I'd put money on 80% of the userbase being less than 10GB.
Big email users are always using email as a filing system. Calling GMail bait-and-switch based on marketing claims made in a 2005 context is a pretty extreme stance. My team at a big enteprise org provided folks with 50-100MB (similar to pre-GMail online offerings) in 2005.
Then Google offered a seemingly limitless service that is to this day practically unlimited for all but the most active user.
There's no bait-and-switch going on here! They've always been perfectly clear in how much storage you get for free. They've never reduced that amount, they have only increased it over time.
The way email was used when gmail was launched in 2004 meant that the 1GB (at that time) limit would not be reached by normal email users. Large attachments became a thing later.
The initial sales pitch was that it was enough at the time, and the free space would grow as the years went by, so you'd never run out.
Sure enough, I'm way beyond my 1GB initial limit now. I just tried to clean things up yesterday (deleting large items from Gmail and Drive), and even once I exclude the stuff from Drive, it seems like I'm over 10GB of my 15GB.
So for now, it's still true... But it seems less and less likely that it will remain true. Certainly I'm already worrying about it.
That said, I find the interface so much better than the competition that I would pay the $2/mo for 100gb to keep it working. Or find a way to delete a lot of emails that should have been deleted long ago, but I followed their "archive everything" pattern with.
I have a domain at namecheap, which forwards my address (say foo@bar.com) to my gmail account.
I use fetchmail from my home computer to bring the gmail content to my local mail server (dovecot), which serves it out to me via imaps.
That means there is usually very little sitting in gmail, and it can accumulate there for a while when I have to do maintenance on my home OpenBSD server (which is quite rare and doesn't last very long generally).
That means I can keep my email address "forever" (it'll always stay foo@bar.com) but I can switch out of gmail anytime I want, as long as the provider I switch to allows POP.
It also means I can take advantage of the spam filtering provided by gmail. I also take advantage of the "advanced parsing" they perform on my mail, but my default assumption is that anybody in the chain will be doing it anyways, so I have no illusions that switching out of gmail will help prevent any data mining.
The problem with Gmail is that it lacks basic cleanup tools such as sorting by size and you are forced to waste your time with tricks like larger:20mb.
The bigger problem with GMail is that the mobile app has no controls to manage large amount of emails - not even a basic 'select all'. Which is hilarious, because Inbox was so good because it was easy to manage most of your email on your phone.
Now my Gmail is overflowing because it's too difficult to archive thing I want, or delete what I don't in bulk. I actually have to log into the web interface to do any kind of clean up, which is something I never had to do with Inbox.
I was noticing just the other day that my Gmail storage is creeping upward towards its limit. I'm sure it could stand some cleaning out although I'm not sure how much that will affect the storage used.
It's also harder if you've been in the Apple ecosystem for a while with getting off with the free tier of storage.
I suspect a lot of us are going to end up paying various subscription fees for storage on a number of services we use.
What I usually do is search mails according to specific criterion, put a label on all of them so that they are easily downloadable from https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout (you can sub-select only the specified label there)
Then a few hours later I receive the download link and download them. Then search for the label and delete them all to release the space.
Don't use the existing archive functionality, because you won't be able to delete them all ; by doing a "in:archive" search the div which propose to really select them all won't pop-up (feature or dark-pattern I don't know).
I was surprised at how difficult it was to make "Delete" a top-level, default UI option even in the latest iOS version of Mail.
It seemed interesting and novel when Gmail first launched and they encouraged archiving everything, but all these years later, mail clients are still engineered around this notion, even when they're not Gmail-only mail clients.
I like to delete emails, and for me, on iOS, that means I tend to use either Outlook or Spark (between iPhone and iPad), or.. ironically, Gmail for iOS, which allows for a one-swipe-action committed delete.
I've gotten pretty lazy about deleting emails. But, the space aside, GBs of random stuff do make it harder to search for older emails and docs, especially if you're not sure exactly what you're looking for.
The opposite problem also exists: I am a bit frustrated trying to archive mail in Yandex Mail on iOS, which actually pushes you to delete and hides archive behind a couple layers. Not sure why, to be honest.
I did too, and so I tried to find a way to back my gmail up. With their rate limiting, I'm not convinced my gmail is something I can actually retrieve. It's 2/3 full and too heavy to pick up, the handles break off. And with 200k emails from 1999 (I think I have emails before gmail in there), I'm in trouble.
It will be healthy for both Google and the internet at large for Google to have a revenue stream diversified from advertising.
If consumers feel that it is normal to pay small amounts of money for useful web-based services, Google and other sites will have better and more transparent opportunities to monetize.
Every time I get near maxing out my drive space, I just take some time to delete everything. If anything is really important I don't keep it in gmail or google docs. That way I can just do a wipe of all my emails and files at any time without worry.
The article seems to be gated to subscribers only. The filter is applied after the article loads, so it may still be readable without executing javascript
E: that seems to only apply when using private mode, for whatever reason.
Outline has been failing on almost any site I care to read recently. It's become far rarer to find an article that Outline works with, in my experience.
As a legacy gmail for organizations account holder, I would be very happy to start paying google to host my stuff, if they would flip me over to the newer gmail stuff that has all the new age APIs, integration, and google assistant stuff available.
I tried to just make a new one and migrate, but there is not a reasonable way I have found to migrate 10 gigabyte email accounts. With their rate limiting, I end up with napkin math suggesting about 30 days to migrate, using someone else's github scripts that do lots of error checking and restarting.
> As a legacy gmail for organizations account holder, I would be very happy to start paying google to host my stuff, if they would flip me over to the newer gmail stuff that has all the new age APIs, integration, and google assistant stuff available.
Aren't you able to upgrade directly to G Suite Basic? (I myself have both domains on legacy free Google Apps, and newer ones on paid G Suite.)
Does Google offer a way to silo storage? I tried to email my wife last week, and she claims to have never gotten it. Investigating, we noticed she hadn't received an email in days. The culprit? Too many original size photos in Google Photos. It seems completely bizarre to me that taking pictures with incorrect settings can bring your email down. To Google's credit and my relief, in fairness, once space was cleared the missing emails did come in. Glad they didn't just start bouncing things!
Glad to hear. Google is known for killing products right and left, Google should charge for products people love and rely on to make sure its 100% sustainable and won't go away.
I do not use ANY cloud for my business/private accounts. I just host my main and backup servers here and there with providers I can switch to / from in a flick of a finger.
The only "cloud" I tolerate is buying stuff from the watching movies on Netflix and shopping on Amazon and likes.
Of course when consulting and client demands it I work with the Azure/Github/etc but that is the extent of my involvement. Anything that happens on that front becomes a client problem. Not mine.
It is a good thing that Google is charging for it's products. They are converting users from products to customers. I am looking forward to Google Search Pro without any ads.
Removing doubleclick ads is something i'm more interested in. Search ads always seem to be contextual, never personalized. Sadly Google Contributor v1 failed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
Ahh yes, the random-tweet-that-proves-my-point tactic... You can find a tweet that "proves" your point for literally ANY issue. And, if you can't... just create a fake twitter account and tweet it yourself. Readers aren't even parsing the twitter account name so you don't even need to create a new account for each new tweet you want to cite.
There are a lot of reasons to be mad at google, having to pay for storage is not one of them.
I began using a secondary Gmail account of mine as the Google Account tied to a free-tier Google Photos upload from my phone.
Bad idea. It's a shared pool of storage resources, which was quickly filled up by photos. Leaving Gmail with no storage. I suddenly was not getting any emails to that account, with no notifications.
Seemed VERY vindictive to suddenly not deliver 75KB emails because I had stored some photos.
I've hit this recently and have been trying to delete enough stuff to make space - the google drive website is awful for doing this. So bad that I wonder whether it's deliberate. I've got 14.8GB of data on there and can't work out where it is.
On my computer, the sync'd Google Drive files come to less than one GB, so it's not that.
It doesn't show folders but clicking the text "14.8 of 15 GB used" or this link[0] will take you to a list of the biggest files, at least in drive. You can also go here[1] to see what services are using the most data.
Thanks. I came back to add the same info, found by googling, that the storage amount includes other Google services. (my space is mostly taken up by photos + gmail, because I've cleaned out google drive in an attempt to get the usage down, not realising that it wasn't the issue. Looks like I'll be spending hours painstakingly deleting photos and emails...
Trying to pay google for anything is a not a good idea, any kind of problem with the payment; your fault or not and they will lock you out of any google services permanently with no support, recourse or escalation.
Easy solutions: don't store photos and other files in your Google account and/or download old mail by dragging it to a local folder in an email client like Thunderbird.
Can I delete attachments in GMail without deleting the email? Googling gives a few potential ways involving the IMAP interface, but nothing straightforward.
Their IMAP implementation is terribly broken. It will most likely just create brand new messages and not delete the old ones. It's one of the many reason I moved off gmail (to self hosting) in 2012. Another being domestic spying .. which everyone has forgotten about apparently.
Which doesn't actually matter if you're in the 96% of people that are not from the USA.
This argument "but we don't spy on USA citizens so now we're all good and ethical" doesn't make much sense to me. If a Dutch company allegedly spies on foreign customers, it really wouldn't change my (Dutch) opinion about my privacy at that company.
You can buy your own domain. Then when you switch email providers you'd just change your domain's mail records to point to the new provider. You can even transfer your domain between registrars if you decide you don't like your current one.
If I don't want Google to run my email, I just switch providers, let's say protonmail or fastmail, etc. But I don't have to give a new address to all my acquaintances.
Government owns the prefix that is rented to businesses who wants to start their phone company (well at least in Europe).
Also the prefix in the phone number is exactly like a domain.
Even if there were no prefixes, one way or another you need a governing body that ensures no clashes occur and has power to decide on disputes. So no two companies try to assign same number to two different customers.
Migrations always are somewhat "complicated". But cost-wise, I'm running my own domain with mail and a NextCloud instance for 3,99 € per month. Probably could get all of that even cheaper, but I like that webhoster. I recently switched my Contact from Google to NextCloud/CalDav, too, so I got rid of that tie, too.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying for a bit better than internet default here, and posts like this make that harder.
Dear rabid mod: detaching subthreads that spur intelligent discussion seems to run counter to your supposed goal. There is no reason Bloomberg should be expected to produce analysis and coverage for free..? ..Unless the person suggesting such comes from a fringe ideology. Hence my comment! :)
I can tell you from long experience that a comment like the one you posted does not spur intelligent discussion. I believe you that it was your intent, but unfortunately intent is not enough on the internet.
Please don't feel bad! but if you'd take the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful. It doesn't necessarily come naturally...personally it took me years to adapt out of my earlier (much snarkier) internet commenting pattern.
I dunno if it is that ironic. Google basically sold people on the idea of their services because they were free whereas Bloomberg never claimed to be free. When was a Bloomberg subscription ever free?
I don't think anyone is claiming that a full Bloomberg news subscription should be free. He's talking about the practice of popping up a paywall after baiting the reader with a few seconds of reading time and a few free articles. This was introduced around May 2018.
Is Google finally switching out of customer acquisition mode and into monetization mode? A sign of slowing growth and increased payout to shareholders to come?
> “I am unreasonably sad about using almost all of my free google storage. Felt infinite. Please don’t make me pay! I need U gmail googledocs!,” one person tweeted in September.
Will journalists PLEASE stop taking tweets from any rando out there and publishing them as "news". Yes, with hundreds of million of users you can basically find any quote you want to back up your pet theory.
I feel like I should just open a bunch of twitter accounts and post things like "Journalist X is a complete idiot" and then write an article about how the whole world thinks Journalist X is incompetent, with low and behold all these tweets to back it up!