Hacker News Reader

Comment by part1of2 | Hacker News Reader

> Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.”

Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait & switch, and I saythat with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions

View on HN

You could argue that all hyper growth “build it and they will come” types of companies do this bait and switch. It’s inherent to the startup culture that emphasizes capturing users above earning profit in the early stages of a company.

Think about how many VC-backed companies offer services at discounted rates today in hopes of being able charge higher rates for that service in the future. This is endemic to tech generally, not just Google.

That isn't just a tech thing either. Look at "new and improved formulas" or other companies which after they develop a good reputation piss it away cutting corners.

Google has the ultimate smartass retort to justify it to critics especially if they are on Capital Hill. "I thought it was considered unfair competition now to provide something others can't now because we are apparently 'too big' now."

> Look at "new and improved formulas" or other companies which after they develop a good reputation piss it away cutting corners.

MBAs have "optimized" the flavor out of everything with their little spreadsheets and graphs and quarterly earnings reports. I can't go to a chain restaurant anymore.

Not even "able charge higher rates for that service in the future", equally good is just bought out and shut down.

The obvious solution is grandfathering. Google Photos decided to grandfather old photos: only photos uploaded after June 2021 count towards your storage limit. That's nice, but the obvious solution to prevent all this outrage would have been to grandfather in old user accounts: anyone already using Google Photos has no storage limit for compressed images (as before), but new accounts have the new limits. That allows for fast growth with insane offers at the start of the product cycle, while switching to a more profitable model for later users.

This is how most companies operate. For example I'm on a mobile plan that's better than anything currently offered by the provider. They don't force me to switch or change the plan I'm on, they just don't allow anyone to switch to that plan.

Considering the market penetration of Google Photos and the lack of any compelling reason to switch, I doubt that grandfathering would have accomplished what they're trying to do here. Phone companies also eventually kick people off of grandfathered plans, or change them so substantially that they are no longer recognizable. For example, I remember the AT&T unlimited plan that came in the early days of the iPhone. It started out reasonably cheap but eventually became extremely expensive.

> That's nice, but the obvious solution to prevent all this outrage would have been to grandfather in old user accounts: anyone already using Google Photos has no storage limit for compressed images (as before), but new accounts have the new limits. That allows for fast growth with insane offers at the start of the product cycle, while switching to a more profitable model for later users.

The fact that Google didn't do it is another reason why one could call it a bait-n-switch model.

Google 'subsidizes' some of their services by leveraging them to gain valuable information. Google voice was used to train their voice analysis algorithms. Recaptcha has been used to transcribe text for google books, road signs etc for street view, and now objects for waymo.

If I had to bet, photos was subsidized by the value of the training pool it generated for their object recognition neural networks. The cost of image storage has only gone up, and the I would image they have enough images to train on, so they did the math and removed the major incentive (unless you buy one of their phones).

I would also bet that they had a meeting at some point trying to figure out how to push people to sign up for google one storage. I just wish they had decided to offer legit customer support for paid users.

To be fair, Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable. I pay £2.50/month for 200gb of storage which more than covers my lifetimes worth of photos so far (in full res with a fair few RAW photos in there too).

And they're not deleting any photos that users already uploaded. I think Google deserve all the criticism they get for shutting down services. But this one seems to have been handled quite well.

Well it is like an infinite order of magnitude of a difference when PROMISED otherwise.

For most people, 15GB can very well be a lifetime.

There is the letter and there is the spirit, though.

Not even close with social media, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.

This does not sound true at all. Everyone has a camera and most everyone takes a lot of photos. A large number of people take videos too. I would be shocked if the median smartphone user didn’t take at least 5 GB of photo/video every year.

That’s like 5000 photos with today’s resolutions. Many people go through that in a year or two.

Source: Anecdata

15 GB/30,000 days ≈ ½ MB/day. You can’t type that, but that would be a single photo every week or so, or about 4,000 over a lifetime. Doable, but it would require quite a few habitual changes for most.

If that was true they would not have made the change as the marketing value of "unlimited" would have more than paid for the few users that did exceed.

However they know, as with all data things, that people will continually expand their consumption, with more and more mobile devices making not only extremely hi res photos but now 4K video, the need for storage will only increase

This type of comment is on the same vein of "640K ought to be enough for anybody." or "we will never need more than 4,294,967,296 addresses"

While technically true this also applies to literally any product marketed as unlimited, lifetime, or infinite. There are always restrictions because the world is finite and the resources of a single company even more limited. I would agree with you if you suggested that such marketing should be banned, but this is hardly a google-specific problem.

That’s similar to what Microsoft (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/onedrive/compa...) and Apple (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238; for fun/education, check the pricing in Colombia. I had to google to find the explanation for that) charge.

I also think syncing to one of those is the best solution for most consumers, even though its not a true backup and it runs the risk of account closure for uploading forbidden content.

> To be fair, Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable

That probably depends, on whether you factor in the profit Google makes from mining your data. That should be subtracted from their operating costs and only then compared to what they charge for the storage. My guess is that they'll make quite a killing on the thing, as a whole.

Even besides the morally questionable aspects (of the data mining), considering their position and leverage they might very well be slapped with some anti-trust rulings in the future.

Unlikely to happen in the US, since the meaning of anti-trust there has been systematically eroded and limited to where it has become all but a complete farce (compared to its original meaning/intentions). However, that's what you get when large corporations can pump vast amounts of money into politics, as if they were a voting citizen. But there is still some hope in other places. Either way, it shouldn't take rocket science to see how Google has a tremendous (unfair) advantage over any competition in this regard (which is what anti-trust really is about; not just avoiding/regulating absolute monopolies).

Is google mining photos for profit?

What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?

Very little. I think training data for image classification is one benefit.

Google conspiracy theories are just HN's preferred sport.

... says the person hiding behind a throw-away account

Data for training neural networks?

Is unlabeled data even useful for that purpose?

Unsupervised learning can identify all the distinct people (and animals) in every photo you've taken. Then they ask you "who is this"?

1 picture is worth a 1000 google adwords

I would be very surprised if Google is not data mining everything they can, it's always been their main business model.

With the photos it could be as simple as merging the meta data from those photos together with a user profile for even more targeted advertising.

Somebody making a lot of photos of certain things might be more interested in buying these things.

I'm pretty sure the real data wizards can think of quite a few more, and better, ways to monetize such data, particularly at the scale that Google is collecting it.

I believe they can't do that without explicitly stating such usage of data in terms of service.

Very well paid teams of lawyers have spent considerable time and effort writing these terms of services. In the case of Google there is so much of this stuff, for all the different services, that Google doesn't even have a single conclusive ToS document, but instead a whole website [0]

Good luck finding anything explicitly stated in there.

[0] https://policies.google.com/terms

> What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?

Are you asking why data is valuable or what data can be found in photos? They could pour over every detail captured on camera taking note of locations, any products seen the background of your shots, the types of clothes you and your family/friends wear, who wears or doesn't wear makeup, etc) then they can use facial recognition to identify everyone in your pictures (photographed intentionally or not) and determine their relationships to you and each other then update everyone's dossiers with whatever new information they managed to gather from your pics.

Or they could just jerk off to your nudes. Who knows.

Google Photos could track a persons travel and dining and things we are fond of. Google Pay could track which friends we pay money to and where we hang out. An tourism council could target drinking buddies of somebody who visited there.

Facial recognition for who else is in the picture. They've never had a good social graph like Facebook. This is one way to construct one.

Alphagoog is an advertising company. Everything they do is focused on efficient selling of advertising. They will perform any surveillance they can in order to improve the profile they have of you, regardless of your status as a registered user of their services.

From photos you can find every person you (in person) know, everywhere you've gone, everything you do, everything you own (and don't). So long as it shows up in a picture once. If storage for 200gb costs _them_ a couple bucks, and that's the price of a few ad (conversions), it would seem to work out. I'm an outsider of course, would be interesting to understand the actual economics from someone more familiar with the details. Of course, if the story were this rosy they obviously wouldn't be charging. So I'm sure its quite a bit more nuanced than this.

Most will agree that the offer is reasonable. But is that good enough, in this case? Should it be legal to front-load your business by promising something, and then going back on that (not because you have to, but because you change your mind)?

I feel like it should not, because the competitive advantage you get by offering things for free is incredibly huge. Whenever that gets a business to a place where people will be very unhappy to leave the service, you are in effect forcing people pay a price they have not agreed upon when they started using the service – be it the subscription fee or the price of forced migration.

It is very hard to put a price on breaking a promise like this, and since it's so hard to grasp, it can easily seem overblown, but millions of people and their decisions on very much related issue (deciding between an Android mobile vs an iPhone) were affected. It's not a matter of a startup trying and failing to be profitable, and either going bankrupt or being able to continue to provide a service. It's simply a giant optimizing for front-loaded profit. In my mind, Google does not deserve any leeway on this.

Such a law would basically make startups impossible. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, I think the startup culture is pretty toxic. Just an interesting result.

With one hand it would eliminate the opportunity to bait and switch, with the other it would extend a supply of users who weren't busy feasting on someone else's bait.

The real question is whether you could legislate and enforce such a law in a manner that couldn't be circumvented with simple accounting tricks.

It seems to me, markets have short term memory because markets are composed of people who also have short term memory. Bait and switch seems to be a quite effective market capture mechanism. Bait with something alluring at a loss, build momentum, then pull away once little could stop that momentum. Along the way, build in hurdles that make it difficult to transition away from the service through technical and other commitment hurdles.

Rinse repeat and as long as you have a decent product and enough capital to front-load the model and take initial loses, you seem to win everytime going forward. At this point, people even shun phrases like "vendor lock-in" like an external business dependency isn't a potential liability.

> But is that good enough, in this case? Should it be legal to front-load your business by promising something, and then going back on that

Did the user agreement - or even the marketing - at the time this was offered stipulate that unlimited photo storage would continue forever? As a user I never interpreted it that way - there's no free lunch.

You can get your photos out onto your own hardware using Google Takeout easily enough.

Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable FOR NOW!

30 GBP per year for measly 200GB, I can have 1TB for 40 GBP (and I am talking about more expensive external drive) and I am not scaling it like Google

so no, that's not reasonable at all to pay 4-5 times more for online access to something you can have in safety of your home and actually own and if you keep using the drive for 2-3 years the comparison makes it even much worse deal for Google, after 3 years you are on 90GBP compared to 40GBP for 1TB hard drive, only 11 times more and you still own no hardware, what a great deal!

if you intend to pay as much you might as well buy sinology and have your own cloud through the app in your home without anyone harvesting your data

Apples to Oranges. Google replicate and have roughly ~ 3 copies of your data, your 1TB hard drive does no such thing, has zero redundancy, isn't available from your phone, can't automatically backup photos from it, etc.

except only reason many if not most of the people keep using google photos is free unlimited photo backup, let's see how many people keep using it when they run out of those 15GB

you can have redundancy with two drives for price which will pay itself within less than two years and you will have significatntly bigger backup capacity for connecting external harddrive directly to your phone through USB OTG and pressing one button, I find that extremely convenient, after all automatic google backup was pretty fucked up and freezing and unstable for years

what is the most important is you have your data backed up and it does not matter whether you have to connect drive and press one button or it us supposedly done automatically

This is much better stepped pricing than Dropbox'

They probably meant the lifetime of the google service.

So anywhere from 15 minutes to two years.

Almost. I'd say they meant, "the lifetime of this version of the terms of service of the Google service."

> Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.”

That sure did change and within the classic 5-year business plan model as well.

>Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait & switch, and I say that with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions

Yes, though how many where planned and how many organicly just ended up that way from a business perspective.

We are all used to the marketing budget phase of companies, initially offering great services and deals, just to get a foothold and then after that period, change bit by bit with the niceties eroded away.

Sad to say that many company does this, just marketing wise it feels less obvious as they are initially in effect using the customer base as the marketing with word of mouth and as people love free, that works out. So down the line many will feel put out by such changes, some will stay with it be that economical evaluation or hassles in moving (not everybody a tech head), so a complacency lock-in happens with so many.

Personally the straw with google came from the endless robotic termination stories having all the services pulled for one misinterpreted action upon on another service they just happen to run. But more so the way they handled Google Music, forcing those who paid for content to be shafted towards a platform just forcing you to pay again as some subscription model to access features you had before and would expect. With that, faith in many things Google does will be tainted, however good intention they seem, the worst case down the line thoughts will stick out way more from all the past instances now.

That all said, I do get it, companies operate to make profit, otherwise they are not a company but a charity. Still, false advertising needs to catchup with the digital age and T&C needs some form of regulation as currently it's still a bit of a mess. After all, people brought Google Phones, sold by Google and some would of done so on the back of what was said in 2015 - so there is that whole avenue of debate that may play out legally. So could be something that gets more depth in the comming months.

Another way of looking at this, perhaps, is that business concerns are deterministic. Deterministic is too strong a word, of course... but that's the idea.

15 years ago, the milkiness of potential cash cows was unknown. Search had an ad model that worked really well, as long as you had majority market share. Meanwhile, google had some great wed development chops. They could make a move on email, rss, a web based office suite and sweep the whole market in a short span. It was cheap enough, and each one might turn out to be a major business. Being free made sense. Higher product success rates and who cares about $10m here and there. The goal was that some of these would become multi billion dollar businesses.

I'm sure people remember the "google wipeouts" of startup territories when they released the latest something for free.

Fast forward... the bar for financial success is 25X bigger. Google's main problem is putting capital to work. We're way less naive about financial potential. Most of Google's important competitive dynamics are within oligopolies. There aren't hundreds of startups that threaten android or even youtube at any given time. A lot of the rollovers from Google pre 2010 just don't make a ton of sense.

You end up with these business/product units arbitrarily attached to stuff in the business. It's not obvious what they're for commercially, which makes them hard to manage. A commercially self sustaining unit can just operate like a business. It's easier.

It's the organisational version of technical debt.

Is this not a commonality between most "tech companies". The combination of tech, moving fast, disruption, etc, means that there's a lot of promises that drop once reality hits.

I suspect they placed some big bets initially on the value they could derive from it for use with AI/ML. Perhaps they've since realised that they bought too much into the surrounding hype (much of it generated by their own marketing) and are starting to view that strategy as a liability should governments start tackling privacy.

I'm an avid photographer and had a few friends who were hooked on google photos, I've always been skeptical because I know how pricey storage can get and figured this would always happen. I'm glad I didn't move all my photos onto Google Photos like my friends, I don't envy their situation now.

Their situation of having to pay $24 a year?

My friends have at least 1TB. My one buddy who was the biggest google advocate has 10TB+. He moved all his photos there and deleted them off harddrives etc.

Photos you've already uploaded remain free.

In fact I believe photos uploaded until some time next year still won't count towards your storage.

A lifetime of memories offers the greatest opportunity for bait and switch "marketing". Do you think the statement you quote means that Google 5 years ago meant to make a gift to users, but then someone changed course?

What did the leaders say to their engineers, did they mislead them?

They are not changing down the service, merely changing the price for it. A price increase after 5 years of service can hardly be considered "bait and switch".

We need to remember that $0 is still a price.

If $0 is a price, Google is increasing the price by an excessive infinity%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com