An update to storage policies across your Google Account
blog.google
blog.google
That's different from just deleting all your data because you're inactive. Which is it?
Edit: it seems both. Here's the blog post (maybe this is a better link): https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/
Once you hit the 15gb limit, you stop receiving emails within 24 hours. 2 years is plenty time versus "Hey. You are out of storage. In 24 hours, we're cutting off communication." [1]
Also, Gmail delivers an in-band message about your quota, but not in Inbox, Inbox for iOS, nor the Gmail app for iOS nor Gmail for mobile web. ONLY Gmail classic for desktop web. So I didn’t get those banners, either.
In other words I still find this quota system difficult to use despite the fact that I was the tech lead of Gmail delivery SRE for years.
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
Gmail backup archives are easy enough to load and read in other email programs, if google's storage ever becomes unreliable for you.
Regardless, all you'd have to do is log into it once a year to avoid this. You should probably be backing it up externally at least this often if you care about the content...
Indeed, this says no:
I've received multiple warnings for some of my unused domains.
I believe the Google Apps "target for deletion" process only gets triggered if none of the accounts in a domain are logged into for a period of time.
Also, books used to be printed on better paper; modern cheap books will not last as long as the old ones did. I have a couple of collector's edition books printed on acid-free paper...
It's just nice to a/ have an extra copy just in case and b/ it's more enjoyable/sentimental than looking at photos on a laptop, smartphone or TV.
At least my kids really enjoy it a lot. They liked to look at the albums my mom made from my pictures when they were between 2 and 5, still do today, even though they perfectly know how to navigate to all the photos on a tablet. That's when I decided to do it.
Google's "Dear Sophie" ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhPklt9nYas
At the time it wasn't fraudulent, though.
And now even compressed jpegs have a size and time limit.
The OG Pixel said original quality for life, and that persists. Every other Pixel until Pixel 4 had a time limit on unlimited quality original uploads, and THAT persists. And even for Pixel 4 & Pixel 5, they're persisting the unlimited "high quality" storage option that they advertised the phones as having.
Don't get me wrong, I'm annoyed enough about them dropping unlimited original on the 4/5 that I download the 4k videos off of Google Photos and re-upload them over an old Pixel I have to get them to not count against my storage limit. But the ads have matched their current commitment, and they haven't reneged on any of the policies advertised for that given phone, at least.
Mine was ended. I've got an OG Pixel.
Basically, you get an email address, and any email you send to it is streamed to a storage account of your choosing, with optional minimal processing (e.g., convert your emails into Markdown prior to storage).
I spent a while setting up the mail processing backend using Postfix + a mail filter written in Rust.
I ultimately ended up scrapping the project because:
A) It didn’t seem like there was a large enough market of paying customers.
B) There already are a few services that do something like this, but with a focus on attachments.
- dump your gmail to gdrive with "google takeout"
- dump your gdrive with rclone (to some cloud service or whatever)
https://forum.rclone.org/t/is-it-possible-to-directly-backup...
I would never trust a 3rd party for this kind of project. But I like that you cannot edit your emails. It just feels more honest.
Now I am thinking of sending him hand written letters by mail. And just save them until he is old enough. I can add photos or his other favorite things in the letters. It would be a lot more fun to open these letters in the future instead of reading a text file.
I was very glad that they understood the mistake right away once I pointed it out.
So maybe you could become a paid user, then add that account to your family account?
But certainly, you should back that account up. And consider moving to another service.
I also have a regular ema backup script that backsup the inboxes so the emails are always available offline!
I spent $600 over a decade ago and put 7.5TB in my server. I spent $600 this year to add another 28TB.
I’m at nearly 40TB in my home server for maybe $1200 invested over the last decade.
Combine that with Gmail telling users for years that they had plenty of space, so there was no need to ever delete anything, and people believed it. Now you have a decade of emails with giant attachments or embeds that may or may not ever get looked at, and that keeps growing.
I agree with the other poster who brought up storage costs not keeping up with growth of stuff to store.
I wonder what this means for youtube...
But their Google music fail, their rising phone prices, their bait and switch photo storage, and low quality search results have caused me to change.
Any alternatives to Chrome, Firefox on both Android and Desktop are buggy, I want a different company?
https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/iq33nv/brave...
When it was launched a year or two ago, Brave didn't integrate with the Chrome extension web store, but now it does (just like Vivaldi). Of course, also like Vivaldi, you may not need another adblocker since Brave has "shields" which are very easy to enable/disable (but it works fine if you install ublock origin, privacy badger, quick JS switcher, etc.)
Opera was sold to Chinese investment fund, they are scamming short term loans in Africa now.
Vivaldi was created by old Opera exec with same goals as old Opera. Their problem is not being scammy, neither is privacy. Their biggest problems are code quality - UI in javascript is sloow, closing tabs or fullscreening youtube video takes one full second. Then there is culture of secrecy - pretending open source by dumping uncompilable tar.bz2 code shreds from time to time and keeping bug tracker behind closed doors in order to not show how (not) many people work on it and what bugs they ignore for years.
There's also this: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-open-source/
A reasonable price point is that of a 10 TB HDD, you would need 430 new disks of that size everyday.
Would love to learn about what kind of contracts they enter in with hardware manufacturers.
Looking to beef up my knowledge.
If this is true, this calls the whole notion of "Gmail security" (and more generally large third party email provider security) into question. Now think about all the changes Google makes in the name of "security". One misspelling or typo and it is all for naught. The mail is sent to another user.
Does it really make sense to use a free third party email provider like Google for important purposes. It seems like we are making identity theft even easier (not to mention online ad services). One thing we know is Google will not discourage use of Gmail for important matters linked to a real identity. They want more personal information, not less. Meanwhile Google discourages automated creation of accounts not linked to real identities, which would be safer if compromised.
I never contacted anyone about this for fear Google would just delete both accounts to save their own asses.
Still receive those emails to this day.
However recent times have convinced me that it's time to move away from the big ol G. This is space issue is one of them.
mailcow anyone?
At first I tried to rectify the mistakes but gave up due to lack of response.
There's also at least two alternative explanations.
I also get a lot of emails to an account I own from someone who keeps using my email instead of theirs. You'd think they would have noticed they aren't receiving them by now, but apparently not. Are you also totally sure that it's not just someone else entering an email address they don't own for work and party invites?
And for a second explanation, are you sure it wasn't hacked/stolen?
There's groups of people out there that bruteforce and then sell OG accounts, such as short twitter handles and common firstname.lastname email accounts.
The fact that the forwarding rules are still setup and working actually leads me to think it's more likely someone else stole the account rather than that it was deleted and recreated, assuming someone else really has access to it.
There's other possible ways your account could have been compromised too, like having a backup email address for it on some other email provider or domain that did go under or get compromised, but a weak password or a re-used password from a leak seem most likely for the compromise route.
Do you have evidence somehow that the account wasn't stole in that way?
The party invite was from a real person, not those evite sites.
I can no longer login to the old account and my recovery options no longer work.
While yes, the possibility of a hacked account crossed my mind, but Gmail is pretty loud when someone logs in from a new ip.
This has been atleast 2 years now.
Maybe I should call him. He isn't doing well with his realtor sales.
You're getting that other person's email because someone has the wrong address for them.
What does happen somewhat often though, is that people receive other people's mail because it's been misaddressed by the sender.
If you search HN there is a quite interesting thread on it.
Per https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail... , the limit is 365 days of inactivity.
This is the video that comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoUrLbHg5z4
I'm not sure if it's good or bad (probably a bit of both) that much of my early time online is largely gone--and I didn't have a significant time "online" before I was about 20 or so.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010718195237/http://www.geocit...
It was a blast from the past for me, amazing times for the internet.
That account is still up, though, and I don't believe I've checked it from the website itself in years, although it is one of the accounts I've linked to my Outlook app. So the mere act of polling an account for email might be enough to be considered "active".
I haven't checked what would happen if I did the same polling but only used Thunderbird instead.
Startup idea: SaaS that you register you email addresses and periodically does an IMAP request to keep them active. Premium tier would provide actual archiving of your emails.
A distributed service where a group of people all have their own service to "ping" their personal "important accounts", and which accept federation with friends or other users of the service, so if your server/vps/serverless/whatever platform instance goes down your pings still happen from your connected servers.
Elevator pitch: "Like IPFS, but for cron jobs calling curl."
I had that Black Mirror thought to strip personality from data.
https://myaccount.google.com/inactive
(More info: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546)
This utility allows you to give access to a variety of data to another user when your Google account becomes inactive for a configurable long period of time. It also allows you to send certain emails or whatever.
I recommend everyone who uses a Google account checks it out at the very least. It's a hell of a tool.
That makes sense(funny?), I suppose it is different if you have a relatively active/recent relationship. Hope the illness is worked out.
Also yeah, it is your own private details I get that, I wouldn't ask my friend if I could see their email. Just in my case it was the only potential record of my dad's thoughts.
It was a bittersweet moment, for sure.
I should go change it.
Too late!
(Seriously, folks, change your password first, then post!)
A lot of people also have password resets on gmail linked to their old hotmail accounts, so you can just re-create their old hotmail to hijack their current gmail.
Far from being surprised free email services "allow reusing emails", I'm way more surprised that orgs like banks and PayPal and crypto exchanges allow using email or sms as "secure reset or 2FA" protocols.
1: http://www.itnews.com.au/news/telcos-declare-sms-unsafe-for-...
In a similar way but a different mechanism, I also had the same thing happen with some accounts which I had opened up using my mobile phone number. I have struggled with mental illness throughout my life, and one of the things that can happen through crises in particular that can have vicious consequences is having no ability to regulate your behavior, in particular your finances, so you easily and quickly wrack up debt, cash out retirement accounts and blow through all that money, and being unable to pay your phone bill (or any other bill) leads you to losing that phone number, and any account which you access through that number.
The systems that we use as a society to authenticate identity for access to digital services and systems, is incredibly punishing to people who struggle with mental health issues. It's a bit of an own goal, since some of the potential solutions to it are potentially technical in nature rather than requiring legislative or societal action.
That said, the difficulties presented by the digital world to people who struggle with mental illness pale in comparison to those they face in the physical world, and how ineffective the society, governments, and medicine are at helping those people, sometimes hurting them in that process through lack of training, ability, and the flaws in the design of the overall systems.
I was able to grab myfirstname@yahoo.com. The address looks neat.
Since I’ve had that address, I’ve received password reset emails, bank documents, airline tickets and what not.
Massive security hole is an understatement.
I used to have a great friendship with people in "Hackers Lounge: 1" and everyone used to be 1337 for cracking original names like you said.
I got my first name, and a few friends and I had illegals like \\//\\//estside and H a C K e R and .oO(d00t) which weren't compatible with the email service.
It's a pity that a generation later, the internet meant facebook and not the kind of inquisitive fun I experienced! (maybe I should have played more sport lol).
Of course, phone numbers are recycled by telephone providers. So that'll be fun in a few years.
Haven't used MS services since then if I can avoid it.
Nov 1, 2001 https://www.neowin.net/news/infrequent-hotmail-users-face-ou...
https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service...
I just found that I can re-register my deactivated username at Fastmail if I want to. That's not cool.
That's something I paid for!! It matches my HN name, my domain, the alias I use on IRC and discord etc. I'm still pissed about it.
(I'm a buy and hold, hold, hold, hold, investor.)
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/24/799345159/episode-967-escheat...
Now, I make a point of logging into all my financial accounts a couple of times every year. Easy to forget retirment/mutual fund/insurance accounts.
1. Verify balances and look for any sign of fraud.
2. Verify contact information (address / phone / email).
3. Titling: As you get older, make sure you understand how your account is titled. Individual / POD / Joint / Joint WROS / Trust / etc. Each of these has specific consequences to you.
4. Beneficiaries: Similarly, make sure you understand the significance of submitting beneficiaries on your accounts.
Example: I missed updating an older account to include my new wife.
This is a good place to start: https://store.nolo.com/products/estate-planning-basics-espn....
https://asic.gov.au/regulatory-resources/financial-services/...
At the end of the day if you’re neither paying for nor even using the service, then why should they keep your account active? They have no obligation to store people’s data indefinitely at their own expense.
It’s also not a great long term solution for yourself as you’re introducing more moving parts into your content delivery that can fail. Really it should be seen as a short term strategy for deprecating old addresses rather than a solution that runs indefinitely. And that’s just good practice irrespective of Google’s retention policy.
Those guys certainly didn’t think about retention periods because they were checking their mail regularly anyways.
And I distinctly remember Google emphasizing the storage / never-delete part of it in their ads and outreach. I very much doubt it would be actionable in any legal sense, but it's certainly a change of paradigm for them to do this.
So, like AWS.
has:attachment larger:10MB
I think sometimes people hold Google to insanely high standards. They gave us so much free stuff that people get mad when they try to charge for it. Others say to move to paid services where you're the "customer not the product", but people would absolutely lose their shit if Google started charging for Gmail, Maps etc.
I can't help but empathize with all the founders who warn about how difficult it is to raise prices.
I don't get why companies selling storage cant offer higher and higher plans in say 2tb chunks.
Cue a shift in business models as Apple et al (and probably Google itself with Android) limits what data can be accessed at any time.
If you’re really paranoid, download a 2nd copy and put it on a hard drive that you then leave unplugged from all computers and the internet until the next time.
Simple solution for anyone with broadband, and then if you ever lost your cloud data due to subscription lapsing or inactivity you have 1-2 local copies for you or your family.
As someone who does this every month, the downside is that there are often glitches in the export (which they usually catch) and you'll need to set up a new export to get them to try again. In the worst case, I've needed to re-export three times to get them to green flag it as a clean collection without any errors (which sucks when it's a couple days for them to prep it and then another while to actually download and store 300GB of data).
Use the 3-2-1 backup method (3 instances of data, 2 of them not the original (backups), 1 of them offsite). I use cloud backup(s) for my offsite(s) and the remaining backup lends itself to being an external harddrive (or a very well firewalled NAS if it must be on the network).
In general, it's good security practice to keep a set of backups offsite, and disconnected.
"Export 1 of 1 will start on 18 November 2020"
Any idea what I'm supposed to do about that?
> If you're over your storage limit for two years, Google may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos
Honestly that seems far more generous than I’d expect — why should Google (or any other company) be expected to store your data indefinitely if you stop paying them?
/rant.
Seems a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario.
Plus, unless that was part of the contract, why do you expect it? They're a company, you get what you pay for.
At that point, it was just email, though, and not other files.
Despite that, I still managed to run out of space a while back and had to start deleting emails that I didn't care about. I was quite disappointed in them.
You do see how that can't possibly applying to literally everyone, right? You can't use the argument that "they said it would grow with me" to store 1TB of emails and be surprised when they start charging you.
15GB is a lot. Even if you receive 5 emails with 1mb attachments every single day, that's still almost 10 years. With normal text emailed, you will never run out until you die. Most cloud providers give 5GB. It's fair to say that it has grown with you to a reasonable storage size. If you need more than 15GB, it's fair to say you're beyond that.
I have an account that received only LKML. So just text, not a single attachment. And all written by humans (although many of them and some copying.) The account run out of space after ~ 7 years of LKML.
(Need to check whether the limit is really 15 GB. I think it stopped growing at 4 or 6 GB.)
Admittedly I don't know many cases with such a traffic.
The irony is that Gmail cannot delete more than a couple of thousand messages from Trash/The Bin in one go. It says "All messages deleted", but when you refresh you see that it's not true. You need iterations. I guess they are using something what AWS calls a lambda to empty the bin (don't recall the Google term) and that job hits a limit.
Yeah, I don't use that mailbox for anything serious at the moment. Just an experiment...
I just reached that, and the first alert I see on my email [1] feels quite threatening. It's like I came home, and there's an unexpected eviction on the door.
IMO, this is way worse that account inactivity. Who remembers that ever-increasing ticker on the gmail homepage that advertised "Your storage with us is always growing", and it was like 10gb + the counter was increasing live.
Ridiculous.
Delete some filter emails won't take you 10 minutes
The marketing to acquire users versus to keep them is annoyingly polarizing.
>> Hey! Free growing memory. Choose gmail! Look! A counter that is incrementing in the browser real-time!
>> Much later... Nope. You reached the limit + we stopped your emails from coming in. Goodbye.
I'm definitely on the way out, just have been lazy about it.
You could fetch everything using IMAP and check size locally.
> Summary of the new policies (effective June 1, 2021):
> • If you're inactive for 2 years (24 months) in Gmail, Drive or Photos, we may delete the content in the product(s) in which you're inactive. Google One members who are within their storage quota and in good-standing will not be impacted by this new inactive policy.
> • If you exceed your storage limit for 2 years, we may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos.
Is Google running out of storage?
Also, somewhat morbidly, dead people don't really need their photos and emails hosted perpetually.
And it can be very important to people for the public galleries of dead people to stay up.
I'm really curious to know how much data they'll be able to expunge on January 1 2023, when the 24month deadline expires. It might end up being the biggest "rm" in computer history.
Maybe it's the engineer in me, but doesn't that imply that even if you're active in Gmail and Drive, they'll delete your data because you are not active in Photos? i.e. shouldn't that be an 'and' instead of an 'or'?
> If you're inactive in one or more of these services for two years (24 months), Google may delete the content in the product(s) in which you're inactive.
I guess is all about money. COVID disrupted ad chains as companies over the world revised their spending budgets. Some brick&mortar closed down for weeks thus they likely canceled ads completely. Ad income is fremium fuel. Cost cuts!
Maybe machine learning stuff needs a lot of space?
Now they're also disabling email forwarding for free users which I've been relying on for a decade to catch occasionally relevant emails. Might really be forced to shell out the $3.49 a month for their paid option...
I guess this is kind of inevitable with the scale of storage these kinds of companies work with. Probably someday Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. will have similar plans as the older data they store starts losing its value.
https://www.ghacks.net/2020/11/05/yahoo-mail-drops-email-for...
If you host your own mail server, you could use https://www.fetchmail.info/fetchmail-man.html instead.
I still use that e-mail for online shops, etc. (a bad idea, because I also use it for Facebook, so all the online services that uploaded their customer data onto Facebook has my details courtesy of Zuck). Nowadays Yahoo's web interface keep moaning that I should turn off my ad blocker, and as my little "Fuck you, Yahoo" I keep clicking "No"..
edit: Perhaps my /etc/fetchmailrc file can be a useful starting point for someone[2].
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25060973
I hope they'll bother to send a warning email at least.
I am starting to feel really nervous about storing my life in Google. It's not that I wouldn't pay for these things...it's just that I worry one day I'll lose access and fall into the pit of "trying to get Google to help a single human regain access" that sounds horrible.
FWIW I’ve contacted Fastmail’s support once and they were excellent: they helped through a funny DNS issue that was my own doing within an hour of contacting them, and didn’t bat an eye at the question. It was one of the few times I’ve contacted support and thought “this person knows what I’m trying to do, why I messed it up, and how to fix it” at a deep level.
They’ve either made great runbooks or hire great people, but the result is the same.
The hardest part is dealing with all the websites who (a) don't let you change your email, (b) require you to contact Support to change your email, or (c) break when you try to change your email. FastMail migrated everything (contacts too) from GMail with one click and set up an IMAP poller against it while you work on the long road to convert. $0.02
Edit: just to cover my bases, a 10-year registration of the domain was < $100 USD at Namesilo.
Never using Fastmail after that. :)
[1] https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service...
When I signed up I just forwarded my old gmail account to it. Now it sounds like I should finally update my email address for all the services still using it!
- There is no "always display images from this contact" option if you don't want to load images automatically. You have to click on "show images" every time you read an emai, even from a trusted contact.
- There is no "open mailto: links on FastMail" option on desktop.
- Spam filter is too aggressive. I've missed too many legit mails while trying it.
- Contact list manager is too barebones. There isn't even a "find and merge duplicates" option.
Oh man, this is one feature that I've really missed from Gmail, which actually gives you the best of both worlds by proxying external images from their own servers so images can load automatically without compromising privacy.
Can't blame a small-time email provider like Fastmail from not offering something like this given the resources it'd likely require, but I'm using Microsoft's "enterprise" solution (Exchange Online) and they really have no excuses other than poor prioritization.
Anyone aware of other providers offering this feature?
You can configure images to load always, or just for contacts, or always manually.
(except for the aggressive spam filter)
Is this what you are asking about for mailto links? https://www.fastmail.com/help/send/openemaillinks.html
The spam filter can be customized, but I agree that it isn’t nearly as good as gmail’s. I have it configured to move messages with a score higher than 3.5 to spam which prevents all false positives for me, but 1 or 2 spam emails a week still get to my inbox. https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/spamchecks.html#cust...
I agree that the comment manager is barebones. Fastmail does support CardDAV so you could use a different contact manager but I haven’t had the need.
Edit: I swear I am not a Fastmail shill. Just a happy customer!
I would think there is some docker container I can run in a VM and go about my business.
https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver
My emails get rejected from @comcast.net but nobody else as far as I can tell. I haven't figured out a good way to debug the issue. As a result, I am not completely off of free Gmail. If you need your emails to be 100% received on the other end, I would recommend paying a hosting provider.
It enables for a surprisingly pain-free email migration experience as I found out not too long ago, where all you have to do is point the DNS records to the new provider and do an IMAP import from your old email provider, and everything will just work as you'd expect.
If I wasn't already sold on the power of federation, that would definitely have sold me.
As for the actual email provider, I'm currently using Microsoft's standalone Exchange Online plan, which costs $4 per month: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/compa...
No major complaints so far.
Fastmail makes this easy for me: I have an @fastmail.fm email from them that I have only ever provided to my domain registrar and I’ve set my MUA to scream and shout loudly if it ever gets mail.
That + using Fastmail for all my domains makes this seamless for me.
> And if you ever forget to renew it, you will lose it.
I’ve had one gmail account nuked by Our Benevolent Overlord’s AI for no rhyme or reason. At least it was unimportant, but it still happened - and I have zero recourse to get it back.
Losing control of my domain or a paid email service? That’s entirely on me ;)
So now once they turn 13 and you hand over the password, it'll be deleted?
Deleting old data, increasing ads on YouTube, ...
So I guess that's a way to enforce that users have only one account (or a small number).
I have a dozen accounts. I don't really use most of them a whole lot. And all but 2 of them have very small amount of data stored. I created them mostly to isolate them in their tracking, not to get a huge amount of free storage.
No idea what the conditions say about multiple accounts. I don't waste my time reading them. I understand that their lawyers have spent a lot of time to reserve all rights to them and leave nothing to me. That's the price of free services.
So many people have defunct accounts, filled with personal data just waiting to be hacked. I’d be totally up for legislation to enforce “must automatically delete inactive accounts”, it’d reduce the efficacy of hacking shitty old services with bad security, who are probably storing your password in plain text or md5ed.
I'd invite people without knowledge of running a business to take the time and think this through before jumping in the outrage bandwagon.
I've had google lock me out of my account due to their bad password reset heuristic (which is a social scaling problem due to the above) which means I'll completely lose my address in a year (currently forwarded to my own domain.)
There are similar social network effects with eg. Facebook, iMessage etc. although the abuses and problems are slightly different.
This writing style is hard to read any more. My eyes skip over whole paragraphs to get to the one or two sentences that really matter, then my fingers hit cmd-W out of habit.
(Disclosure: My company does some consulting work for Permanent. When I received the notice today from Google of their storage policy change, I realized that the reason it sounded weird to me was that I'd gotten accustomed to Permanent's model.)
Qn. Does it allow a paid user to delete their uploaded files ?
The sad truth is that the whole thing is not about storage. Lately Google just decided to start milking users much harder and basically torture users with insane amount of ads along with a forced movement of their data to monthly paid services like YouTube Music.
Will someone build us a way to heartbeat our Google accounts to keep them prevent them from timing out?
I wouldn't want my emails to be around forever. And while I'm alive I will definitely check it more than once a day, let alone once every 2 years :P
It also biases, manipulates and censors searches and recommendations on its main websites, in various contexts which have been reported here on HN.
So, please try to avoid using any Google services, in particular their file storage.
If a 14TB hdd costs them $200/year to run, 15GB of storage would run about $.21/year. Does that sound right? If storage was that inexpensive I would think think they wouldn't be restrictive.
Full disclosure: I'm the author of Unattach.
From Recital 39 of the GDPR:
"This requires, in particular, ensuring that the period for which the personal data are stored is limited to a strict minimum. Personal data should be processed only if the purpose of the processing could not reasonably be fulfilled by other means. In order to ensure that the personal data are not kept longer than necessary, time limits should be established by the controller for erasure or for a periodic review."
In the context of F500, I've seen compliance efforts around this that have mandated deletion in the case of inactivity for consumer applications that most people would have reasonably assumed would have been kept around even if they didn't log in.
This is hinted at in the article "...to better align with common practices across the industry, the company said on Wednesday." And if we're going to take a cynical view, wouldn't it be that Google would never delete user data (the source of their revenue) unless they absolutely had to?
> As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.
No data from your uploaded content is used in targeted advertising (and there's not much metadata they could really use to target based off of that - who would target based off of "visited Google Drive every other day this week" in terms of adwords customers).
Receiving emails does not seem to have anything to do with it. You need to login once every two years.
If a user hasn't interacted with your platform in multiple years, it becomes hard to validate that they've consented to any data-use changes you push out.
I no longer tell them to use Google Photos.
Edit: Some of my relatives are growing old. There's a lot of talk of backups & storage. But none of that is going to preserve the digital memories we have shared, after they die. All the old URLs that have been shared will, not rot & wither, but one day just up and vanish. Up to the big log-off in the sky.
I really thought a dozen GB of storage from Google to each individual in the world was pretty reasonable. That there is plenty enough resources. But no, in to the garbage file society goes. Throw out all the past. It was the promise, but it's not sound business.
O_______O's approach is based on a model of plenty, of trying to provide & share the production means they equip themselves with. It's good for others, & it encourages one to continue to reap the benefit of the investment, by continually printing photos. Marginal cost ought keep lowering for years & years.
EDIT: It's especially problematic when there's no countdown, and it's not "inactive account wide", it's "inactive in product X."
"The company said it will notify users multiple times before attempting to remove any content."
My experience has shown that they're not great about deletion notifications. They changed how deleted items work in Drive, but never notified me outside of drive (work or personal, my memory backed up by a negative gmail search). Which was fine in this instance, but it doesn't set a great trend.
It's unfortunate, too, because their security group is nicely pedantic in notifying you about things.
My wife currently has a 2TB nvme ssd in her Thinkpad laptop. Around 1TB of that is pictures and photos.
The promise was free unlimited storage & sharing of photos. Now, years latter, you change the deal. People planned to die with this, they read the words on the tin & said, yes, I wish to share photos in a way that will last. Yes, I want to give URLs to people with my photos that they will be able to use.
It's so heartless, so disappointing that such cruel negative people persistenly downvote & leave shitty comments like "you need to pay for it." (This thread here is not popular enough to attract those comments.) This is one of the persistent indicators to me that people in this community need help, need healing, and that there's so few around to show care & concern & support each other just frightens us all further. HN, you have a reputation, and this is it.
The god damned library of Babel is on fire people. The Library of Alexandria, a vast index of humanity, is getting torched. After years of promises that this would not happen. People's willingness to be reasonable over this matter is ghastly, is immoral, & wrong. People who are ok with, who are unsympathetic to this book burning, they scare the pants off me. There's a lot of them out there. A lot of them in here.
A rare insight into the scale of cloud services. Amazon and Microsoft and Google generally keep extremely tight-lipped about the scale they are operating at.
They have been on a cost cutting rampage recently.
gmail: receive, read and/or send
photos: upload or view?
etc...anything else would be appreciated.
There are lots of community oriented providers which don't just kill off accounts in this way and are generally pretty cheap. See sdf.org and webarchitects.coop, both of which are membership based and reasonably priced. (Disclaimer: I'm a member of both)
Also to be honest: If you're not even going to log into your email for 2 years, why bother even paying for it? :)
It's indeed excellent, I might sign up myself. I do have VPSes of course, but I like the concept.
The whole "cloud storage" fad should go away.
(Disclosure: I work for google, speaking only for myself)
If there is grey area, I probably wouldn't/don't care, because what can I really do?
Maybe they are bleeding storage costs?