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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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

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

This is much better stepped pricing than Dropbox'

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