Google “Free” Drive Storage Class Action Lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

Google “Free” Drive Storage Class Action Lawsuit

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18 pointsecliptik14 comments

What about the infinite email?

They said with Gmail, all the email would be free, and infinite, and forever. That you'd never have to delete email again.

Now I have to pay them 1,99 USD/mo just to continue using my email, even though the majority of the email in my mailbox are the public OSS mailing lists -- which could "easily" be compressed if they had wanted to.

P.S. I specifically checked for large attachments using the search -- almost nothing; Google quite literally makes me pay just to have access to searching the OSS mailing lists that I'm subscribed to.

> They said with Gmail, all the email would be free, and infinite, and forever.

Where? Gmail's initial publicity all focused around the fact that it provided 1 GB of storage, and would slowly grow over time. I don't remember them ever promising "infinite" storage.

They had big infographics that their storage was more than infinity.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-24/gmail-hook...

> A big driver of the shift is Gmail. Google shook up the email business when Gmail launched in 2004 with much more free storage than rivals were providing at the time. It boosted the storage cap every couple of years, but in 2013 it stopped. People’s in-boxes kept filling up. And now that some of Google’s other free storage offers are shrinking, consumers are beginning to get nasty surprises.

That link just suggests people mistook "free tier increases" for "infinite"... which isn't much of a promise

1. I remember that as far back as 2004 and 2005, Gmail already posted showed in the UI how much the user was using, out of the total.

2. As a freeloader, you are not in any contract with Gmail; this article is about Local Guides who did a form of work for Google, in exchange for a form of compensation, which is easily seen as a contract.

Oh no. Don't you want to be the customer and not the product by paying for a service you use?

You can pay all you want and still be the product.

Just because they extort a payment from you, doesn't mean you're not the product.

>The tech giant argued that Roley’s reliance on marketing materials around the Local Guide prizes was unreasonable.

Let that sentence sink in for a moment.

"It's unreasonable to believe our marketing is honest and forthcoming." — Google, literally.

Google removing my TB was a pain. It took a bunch of shuffling to get room freed up so other services would work again.

They also got me when they had a set price for life for streaming. That didn't last either.

>Roley says that after he attained Level 4 status, he was enforced that the free storage would only last two years

Should be "informed".

This lawsuit is going to cost them far more than the storage would.

I felt cheated this also particularly because I'd never take the time to break down the storage I used when it was a free benefit so I became locked in.

I had used multiple free accounts for years for the same purpose with minimal aggravation.

I wouldn't mind a little compensation for the nth time they have cheated,closed,broken or otherwise fucked up a product or offer I trusted from them.

That’s bizarre. I pay $10/month and get unlimited Google Drive. If that’s profitable then surely 1TB must be quite cheap for them.

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