Somewhat relevant https://xkcd.com/1150/
Dude uploaded all his work to a service he did not control without having backups or plans to move to a self-hosted blog. Hell, he could have used wordpress.com if he didn't want the "hassle" of updating his installation.
And on top he didn't have local backups? I mean, what if his hard drive had died? Would he have blamed WD or Seagate?
Kind of like the dicussion I have with my collegues that `shouldn't you know.... support the open source frameworks we use to make money with?`... `Why would we do that?` ... Kind of leaves me speachless.
"I want you to give me something, while I hold no absolutely no responsibilities."
Google doesn't operate their 'free' services out of the bottom of their hearts. It's a business.
It is a failure of ethics to then delete that indispensable thing.
There were laws in the old USAmerican West about horse theft. Strict laws! And similarly strict laws throughout history in shepherding cultures, regarding livestock.
The justification for draconian punishments for livestock theft has always been that the animals (property, items) were indispensable. You can't go around drastically changing or possibly ending people's lives by taking the things they depend on away from them. It's wrong!
Very few people backup their Google account regularly (or at all), even though Google Takeout is available. People should, but I'd argue part of the burden is on Google for misleading them into thinking they don't need to.
That's a dick move through and through. We can wag our fingers and say 'you should have known better' but clearly if this were the case all the time, with all our free services, this model of business would fail. It is 'free' so long as it's profitable or has the potential to be profitable to them.
These services have no explicit guarantee that they will last, or protect your stuff, but we expect them to. It's implied in the marketing or usability of the thing. You pay a merchant for an item, you don't explicitly pay to secure your credit card with hashes and salts in a DB, it's implied in the service. I suppose it's your fault if your credit card is swiped because you should have used cash... or gold bullion.
If Google was a storage facility and did this, free or no, they would be liable.
Though could be different for different storage facilities.
For example, lets reverse this a little bit. Lets say you're storing a clients data, backups, 100tb of data with offsite redundancy. The client doesn't pay for 6 months. You've taken all course of action to contact the client but they're unresponsive. It's now costing you money to maintain and service this data. What do you do?
EDIT: This post isn't as well written as I'd like it to be, but parent is bullshit and I think the core argument of "This is not an analogous situation" holds. I need to leave in a few minutes though so I don't have time to write a better argument, sorry.
As a short version though, if this was an analogous situation where google had tried to contact this person to take down whatever was objectionable, and warned them that they should back up their stuff immediately since they could decide to take it down on any business day, I bet this guy would have been right on that.
They didn't though. Giving them social credit like they did is ridiculous.
You always have to inform the user first, even if it's in the contract.
Now compare that to what google did. They were owed exactly 0 dollars for 0 months, they make no attempt whatsoever to contact the client, and they shredded the data without trying to send it back.
It's more like Chad informed the police of the dead body he found in his garage, and they removed it. Chad called to let you know after the fact, because you are obviously not his first priority in that situation.