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Comment by smonff | Hacker News Reader

The way Google made us used to transform an email box as a storage and backup place is terrifying. Sending 2Mo attachments become a norm[1] and lots of people consider having their life stored there.

It just seem not sustainable. If you would do this with paper in the past, your place would just be full of junk. Our cloud life is an horrific stack of garbage. We just don't need most of the things we store, keeping everything as proof of evidences for a potential event that will surely never happen, as if we were all super important targets of an improbable crime scene.

I hate this ideology. Thinking about getting out of it is perfectly sane.

[1] Yes I know storage is cheap, but then forget about ecology and climate change control, I have no proof of this but can't believe that all the Google servers of the world don't have an impact, even if it seems quite clean

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> transform an email box as a storage and backup place ... and lots of people consider having their life stored there.

That might be viable if Google had kept its promise about users never having to delete their emails. As it is, the total capacity (shared with Gdrive) is 15GB, which wouldn't be much of a life.

I was one of the first Gmail users outside Google and got to 14.99GB some time ago, just with email. And I delete loads of it.

But I don't worry too much about losing Gmail. First, all incoming email is forwarded to an Outlook.com mailbox (which never complains about lack of space). Second, I use my own domain name. As long as I never forget to renew that, I should be OK....

> keeping everything as proof of evidences for a potential event that will surely never happen, as if we were all super important targets of an improbable crime scene.

Great point, and I see a chilling effect in your file storages being used to determine your "character" should you be involved in a lawsuit of some kind.

As an innocuous example, perhaps due to my being a millennial, I save thousands of memes on my phone that I find funny and share them with friends on a daily basis.

I would be shocked to hear if myself, or someone I'm friends with, was deemed a "horrible person" by the courts because some Shutterstock images with overlaid text have some dark humor attached.

> [1] Yes I know storage is cheap, but then forget about ecology and climate change control, I have no proof of this but can't believe that all the Google servers of the world don't have an impact, even if it seems quite clean

This is ridiculous reasoning. The best (though imperfect) proxy for the climate impact of a given service is how much it costs. If Google is giving away the service for free, it can't be costing them a lot of energy to run (or alternatively it's producing a lot of value for them).

Also don't forget that We proxy pay google service with Ads. If you are paying something for free doesn't mean that there is no hidden costs.

Also, I am not sure to about drawing a correlation between cost and climate impact.

I don't have a good answer here, but I believe it may be instructive to consider externalities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality). For instance, think carefully about how they may apply here.

Good points there.

I tend to delete lots of things people might keep. I keep my inbox empty as well. Life is easier that way rather than deferring all the storage decisions later.

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