Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer data
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Google Drive files suddenly disappeared - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38427864 - Nov 2023 (281 comments)
Photos I know I've taken are missing. There are periods of time when I walked around a city 10+ years ago taking a large volume of photos, like when I first moved to Seattle. Going back to that window of time in Google Photos, I only have a handful of photos from that walk.
There are also partially corrupted photos from many years back. Photos that only partially render, or render as noise.
Luckily, all of these are random low-value photos from my youth. They aren't core memories of my kiddos growing up or anything. I'm glad I discovered the data loss in that window of time, and not by losing photos of my kiddos' birthdays.
The probability of both failing and/or both deciding to just delete my account because I look "suspicious" is very small. But I _have_ had iCloud mysteriously not being able to retreive old photos.
People forget even s3 will lose files. The reliability is high sure but it’s still sub 100%
But with cloud systems you can always lose your files when a hacker gets access to your root account and holds it hostage, or you lose the phone with the 2fa secret on, or your payment doesn't go through and you miss the reminders, or your account is wrongly closed for abuse by a malfunctioning bot.
Also, we're talking about Google Drive here which isn't GCS (Google's S3 competitor) but a higher-level product layered on top of GCS but with it's own book keeping / ACLs etc. Thus there's more room for error. My hunch is that the data is permanently lost.
Additionally, S3 stores an enormous amount of data such that probabilistically they're bound to lose something to HW failure. 2 years ago, S3 stored 100 trillion objects [1]. With 11 9s of durability annually you'd expect to lose 100 objects a year. The saving grace is that most objects aren't accessed (maybe not ever again) & they detect & correct durability errors on access to ensure that accessed objects definitely aren't lost. So while they "admit" to 4 objects, that's likely an under count because I wouldn't expect them to regularly check if all 100 trillion objects are accessible because of how long that would take.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-s3-storage-now-holds-over-...
https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/How_to_enable_fil...
With photos I do keep them all local to my MacBook, but not documents. Maybe I should.
People who came up in the cloud era were promised the false (impossible) idea that large conpanies could and would eradicate your risk of data loss if you just paid them a few dollars a month.
That's not a thing. If you really can't tolerate some loss, you need to coordinate something more robust across a few different and dissimilar options. And even then you'll still have risk.
That said, even just making sure you keep local copies of your archive or print your treasured favorites can go a long way towards greater reliability that without a lot of extra effort.
Instead I use sync.com (yes, UI is horrible and it's slow, but it works) and my synology NAS that is mirroring to a synology NAS at my fathers house (we mirror each others photos).
Basic rule of thumb, if it's free they don't care.
The quality of their software is vastly superior to Google Drive. They have mobile, desktop, and CLI apps on Windows/Apple/Linux. Been using them for a year without issues.
Their software is well engineered and is open source. https://github.com/meganz
If you have things you really care about not losing, you need a backup strategy.
Google photos only has the low quality photos.
I also now have multiple apps syncing all the photos from my phone so they're stored in a couple different cloud photo locations on top of that.
they are both supposed to have all
dangerous
It's unfortunately hostile for non-technical users that care about their photo metadata, which I assume is most people since it includes data such as creation timestamps and location. It's not too bad to script this if you're savvy (and careful), but otherwise you'll have to pay for a third-party tool[1]
I heard this claim before but I was never able to reproduce it. Does this only happen with the "Storage Saver" option enabled and/or when metadata has been manually changed? At least with the "Original Quality" option my takeout data seems to exactly match the files that were originally uploaded.
For example in the past I had several occurrences of duplicate photos where each of the two instances has exactly the same bytes as the other one. Usually that should have gotten deduplicated, but it hasn't. What's even stranger is that deleting one of the two pictures also deleted the other one. Re-uploading the original photo usually made both duplicates show up again. The way how I was able to get rid of those duplicates was to wait a day or so until I re-upload the data and to attempt that process several times. At some point only a single photo showed up.
Also those duplicates only showed up in the regular photo view. Even if both of the duplicate instances were added to an album viewing the album would only show the photo once.
I have absolutely no affiliation with CubeBackup, but I highly recommend it (and a personal Google Workspace account) for anyone who uses the Google app suite. It costs me $5/yr and is worth every penny.
I've elevated to rclone fanboy since I discovered crypt: https://rclone.org/crypt/
I’ve never looked into rclone although I’ve heard much about it. Looks very cool. I didn’t know it supported Google Drive.
One nice thing about CubeBackup is that it handles all of the Workspace account, not just the Drive file storage, but also the contacts, emails, etc. all of which is equally important to me.
1 - How much time was setup? 2 - How many times did it break in the last year? 3 - How many of the summaries were actionable?
My main concern with active auto backup is maintenance time; my expectation is I'm busy and my personal backup would take me weeks to fix if and only if I notice there is an issue, and the summaries are alert fatigue.
I feel while this situation is avoidable, you will still lose data from your last successful backup and anything less than "just works" isn't viable for anything important vs manual duplication.
I have two copies of some files (local and Drive) and probably a few Drive-only despite having local sync. If my computer died in the same time as Google list the data, I would expect some data loss, but the cost of categorical prevention is very high.
That being said, if it is only $5 and is actually touchless,
I have pretty much all of my stuff in a subversion repo and it serves both as backup and local copy checked out on multiple machines. The only exception is the business stuff (because it is shared with multiple people) and we use Google for that. But an inspection of Google take-out showed that it's nice to have the files but you won't be doing much with them outside of Google unless you download them one-by-one in a format that isn't tied to the Google cloud. And that is very tricky and time consuming.
I keep the version history to infinite, so even if files are corrupted or lost on newer backups I can always reference the old ones, back to day 0. Backblaze is great for this as the storage price is negligible.
I think it works in a similar way to Tarsnap or something like Duplicati, but it’s a lot easier to manage and plugs in nicely to all of the Workspace account (not just Drive).
I use Backblaze which is quite cheap and reliable: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037814594-B2....
There are still tech hurdles yes, but NAS + a decent GPU for photos, email organization, assistant is going to be a killer business.
I got a second Synology for Hyperbackup and send one to the other for backups. Seems to work well.
I can't recommend against this enough, and I work at Google. Workspace accounts don't work with so many services. At least YouTube TV, Nest cameras, Google Home sharing, Google Play family accounts, Android parental controls, and Opinion Rewards are broken in my experience, probably a lot more.
It's a shame, especially for people who've had a Workspace account for many years, and have a bunch of email, documents, and media tied up in it.
I know a little more about the situation, but can't really comment on it here.
I don’t use any of the non-core services because I expect them to be killed off soon anyway. For contacts, email, docs, and drive it works great. YouTube as well.
I have a “regular” Gmail account in case I need to use any niche services that don’t work with my Workspace account.
Overall the trade off is well worth it.
So I pay for dropbox. The dropbox app backs up the photos and the synology fetches them from dropbox.
Granted, you usually want to pare down your words during the editing process, but I'd rather do it manually rather than have some malfunctioning computer system prune random blocks :)
I sent a support email, but it will surprise no one to learn I never heard anything back. Needless to say, I haven't trusted Google Drive since.
(surprisingly?) ... I have colleagues that, even in 2023, will express genuine (not sarcastic shock) when a megacorp doesn't reply or provide decent support. I've only got a few, but the refrain will be something like "wow, I'm kinda surprised google's cloud support doesn't get back to us - sometimes for days. they've always had such a good reputation for support... i hope this is a blip".
It's as if they've only ever read marketing/sales leaflets, then really are genuinely surprised when things are 'normal' (meaning poor performance, non-responsive support, bad/wrong documentation, broken SDKs, data loss, etc).
And... I'm not even generally surprised when I get no support on paid for services. Indeed, I'm generally shocked when I get good and timely support from a paid service. Now... that's less shocking when it's "small startup X"; we've all seen small companies get big/acquired and the very thing that got them there - good service/support - is what is thrown out to start squeezing out profits. Staff get overworked, pissed off, leave, quality plummets, people move to the next small startup service, and it starts over again.
I'm genuinely curious as to what group they have a good reputation for support with.
It will literally delete a sentence immediately after you write it
Infuriating and absolutely no fixes - this is a core issue with write priority and where “canonical” data lives.
I do agree with you, though: one of the most important rules for computing in general is to keep multiple backups of everything. A while back, a friend of mine made a habit of emailing herself drafts of her work, and kept multiple copies on her computer. It did save her once or twice.
1. I write locally and have both manual and automatic backups (local and remote) 2. I upload drafts online for beta and alpha readers to leave comments 3. My group used to use Google Docs for this but stopped once I discovered the data loss
Happily, because local is the source of truth, I didn't lose any of my writing. I did, however, lose some feedback, and reconciling things was a pain.
I think this is like looking at the Burj Khalifa and asking how hard it can be to make a building. It's not just a building, it's the tallest building ever built.
They need the data and look for it and it's not there, but they remember they put it there?
At my job if a log file or data recording is too big for jira, but need to be attached to a bug report we sometimes store them on google drive. And then we link it from the ticket. If much later we get back to it and the link is 404 that would make us suspicious. If someone remembers the link working before that would make it clear it is not just a copy paste error with the url.
Works reasonably well, though Google seems intent on breaking stuff every so often. Also Google hasn't figured out how to make it stop creating desktop.ini files everywhere yet. I'd say it makes them look like amateurs, but amateurs tend to be better at making software.
This is a bit like Google drive adding two files named '.' and '..' to each folder in unix.
That’s what I want to know too. Try to reconcile the cloud sync systems to make sure you aren’t missing anything. It’s basically impossible.
I also go crazy when I see MS touting OneDrive as a backup. I’m pretty sure moving (because of files-on-demand) my data to OneDrive where I can’t verify they aren’t losing stuff is not a backup. Add the risk of being banned and it becomes unconscionable IMO.
Would recommend rclone to anyone, it has worked pretty consistently so far.
> Last year, while Meta’s Facebook and Instagram submitted a combined 26 million reports, Google 2 million, and TikTok nearly 300,000, Apple submitted 234. The year before that: 160.
> Apple isn’t a social media company, so this is hardly a direct comparison. That said, WhatsApp, which is end-to-end encrypted, scans unencrypted content such as profile and group photos for CSAM. It provided over 1 million cybertips to NCMEC in 2022; Microsoft sent in 110,000; Dropbox, nearly 46,000; and Synchronoss, the cloud storage provider for Verizon, over 30,000.
So I thought I might as well use it as a backup location if I have to get this subscription. I don't really expect privacy from these services, I guess it's a tradeoff.
I'm interested in doing something similar for our GD into DB or Backblaze but not if it's a full copy each day - we have 400GB in GD
I hope it is interesting / useful for you to learn that you can maintain a workflow like this without ever installing rclone.
rclone is already built into the rsync.net platform so you can use it to orchestrate transfers like the one you describe:
ssh user@rsync.net rclone sync s3:bucket dropbox:whatever
As an aside, we are looking from moving to a Google + Slack + Notion to OneDrive + Teams + Loop. What is appealing is the ability to collaborate more directly on files and “Loop Components” directly in Teams. But we’ve been waiting for 2 weeks now for support to help us enable Loop, because the instructions in the Microsoft docs aren’t working. They are working on it, which makes them better than Google in our experience, but it has been too slow. Maybe we have to upgrade to premium support?
I wouldn't trust Google with anything important these days. But Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive is so bad.
I don't think that selfhosting is a great option for corporate, but Microsoft and Google are just shit.
Why? When corporations weren't capable of managing credit cards securely, PCI was created and all the lazy businesses were told to either do this correctly, or outsource it to someone who will.
When corporations weren't capable of managing infrastructure, Cloud providers created an out and told all the lazy businesses that they could do this correctly. Businesses believed the hype, fired their on-prem administrators, and still can't do this thing correctly.
So, if you can't be bothered to do something correctly, and you can't pay to get it done correctly, maybe you are not fit to be operating.
> and you can't pay to get it done correctly
Am I reading this right? You're blaming the business that is purchasing a service, for the provider's inability to provide it?
The amount spent on Microsoft suggests a willingness to blow money on the problem.
But with Google having no real support, always shutting down projects, and now losing a lot of people's Drive data and refusing to acknowledge it makes me reluctant to use them.
Teams is janky in other ways, such as Microsoft forcing Sharepoint everywhere, and now we have a chat program that attempts to silo data as much as possible so we a lot of project documentation that isn't always accessible or discoverable.
If you have alternative suggestions, I am open to them.
I wonder if with all this antitrust stuff going on we'll ever see regulation in the form of required interoperability and/or data portability? Instead of trying to break up companies, block mergers, etc, I feel like simple technical solutions would be faster and more effective.
I've seen a couple reasons:
One, often these products are made by companies where the products are not their primary revenue source. The products are often managed as independent business cases. That means they have a budget, timelines, expected revenue figures/costs. It's common for a product to get a low level of investment that only meets the needs of adding new features [to meet sales figures] without ensuring quality. If it were a startup flush with VC money, they could invest all they have into the product, but at an enterprise, it's often the opposite.
Two, often these products are actually acquisitions of startups. You may not know this, but startups tend to churn out some horrifying, janky code just to get themselves off the ground. Buying one of these often leaves you with a huge mess on your hands. Combine that with a lack of investment or cost-cutting, or some of the lead product people leaving, and the product gets worse. Then try to integrate different products, and you're really integrating different messes.
Three, it's genuinely hard to create groupware products that are both high-quality and useful. They're often complex and need to interoperate with one another, yet are built by separate teams. And because they're complex, they each suffer from the standard problems that happen to software products (many books written about them). But the people managing and creating them fall into the same old pitfalls, because software product development is not required to avoid them. Bad management and bad engineering are common, and these products in particular are no exception.
Four, they're actually difficult things to build and sell. If they were easy, there'd be more competition. There tends to be "alternatives", but not with the same features.
Build the ability for integrations (with customer-visible audit logs), inter-user sharing, and proper permissions and you have the modern equivalent of the shared drive from the old days.
And don’t worry about quoting XKCD #927 at me. I know the realities of a project like this.
It's so sad that Microsoft does not see how they ruin productivity of big orgs.
Sharepoint broke Excel - you cannot link between shared documents easily.
They even broke the windows taskbar, which automatically combines things together. They assume that people working in an office have only 1 email open and 1 spreadsheet open, while most have 20 and dont know how to turn off this shitty UI.
I actually found a way where I work now, I made a shortcut to the sharepoint folder from teams that appear in the file explorer, I can then link the document.
Of course this only works for me and not if I share the file.
Can't wait for the merge of the desktop and web excel to finally break it all...
I also overwrote an important document today because the idiotic auto save was turned on, I used the document as a template for a new one without checking.
Luckily I had a copy of the important one in my Documents folder on the local computer which they recommend you not to do since you might have data loss!
Yes, I hate office 365...
Source1 + source2 -> summary report -> consolidated report
(With like 20 source files)
You have to re-enable it in taskbar settings, but it's FINALLY there to be enabled again.
I use a program called StartIsBack to try and return to a more "classic" shell experience, but Windows has done such a good job at tying so much to their shell that from what I hear it's close to impossible to do certain things anymore.
Some replication process at Google had fallen behind by 6 months (and presumably didn't have monitoring/alerting), and someone noticed and in trying to fix it they forced that replica to take mastership (meaning the users now see the 6 month old data).
Since the replicas presumably now have conflicting changes, re-merging the two is going to require a lot of code be written to smartly merge the data, and some users are going to permanently lose data (where they edited an old version of a document for example, and those edits cannot be automatically rebased onto the new version)
Why couldn't you write code to let users compare and choose which version of the data they want to keep?
What will the users do for 6 months waiting for their data to return?
For some files (anything encrypted, for example) this may actually be the best you could do.
Dropbox had this behavior ten years ago, so it's kind of inexcusable for Google today to be just mindlessly overwriting.
To me the most likely one by far is the deletion was actually commanded, for example by a flaw in the program they use to sync, or by malware.
Low frequency data loss until it reaches alerting threshold of 0.1%
I can't prove there's a connection, but it's just been very aggravating when nobody in any forums believes people that make these claims. To be clear she's only asked once, but more than a few other posts have described situations that read similarly and not just "I can't find this one email".
Good backups are a must obviously, I have a backup server on a separate VLAN that syncs ZFS snapshots daily, and daily incremental encrypted backups to Google Drive w/ Duplicati. I‘ll have to reconsider Gdrive now obviously.
The quality of face tagging surprised me, it uses one of the open source algos by Microsoft.
Nothing showing on service status currently
edit - love foldersync pro for my Android. does SFTP/SMB/webDAV and all major cloud services over wifi or 5g.
every night it transfers everything off my phone to my server which is also on parity
Ideally something that pulls from google directly without involving my home computer would be best.
[1] https://kb.synology.com/en-uk/DSM/help/HyperBackup/data_back...
(no affiliation with any above entity)
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/images-create.h...
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eb-...
My script, though I run locally
rclone -v copy /source/location s3:backup.bucket.name/ --transfers 1 --copy-links --filter-from /config/syncfilter.txt --max-delete 20 --stats 5m --stats-log-level NOTICE --update --use-server-modtime --fast-list
RUN curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | bash
[s3]
type = s3
provider = AWS
...
storage_class = GLACIERNow, the failures are my own fault, but at least I can do offline backups to HDDs and BD-Rs, and I don't have to worry about any of the cloud services (TM) messing with my data and me having little recourse.
Yes, I could do separate backups of the cloud things too, but at that point, that just adds 'cloud service' as an option to the first part of the equation:
cloud device storage / local device sync (on and off-site) / NAS
+ offline on-site backups as HDDs & BD-Rs
+ online off-site backups
Doing syncthing with local device sync is cheaper than cloud device storage (recurring costs) and NAS (fixed costs / hardware maintenance)
Additionally, it does not help that the search giants, search functionality for Drive and Gmail is so incredibly poor (more so Gmail, I have found drive search has improved,). For example, you still cannot do AND searches in Gmail properly. You also cannot do wildcard, searches of any kind. (And no regex nor partial regex)
This would prove the data was on drive at one point, but is now gone along with the date and time it was retrieved and saved locally via cubeback up. (Additionally, one can show that it wasn’t deleted via user action by looking at the logs in Gsuite admin, or I think cubeBackup would log a delete as well, assuming you’re retaining those cubebackup logs)
(to be clear I’m simply a user of cubeback up. I have no interest or affiliation with them)
Apple is the only alternative I'm aware of.
Edit: Just to be very very very very clear. I don't want to have to do ANYTHING but pay a bill.
Other people at work agree with me. Google support insists we're nuts.
I only use it when other internal folks start collaborative docs, otherwise I do not trust it. Files don't randomly disappear from my local filesystem (and we test our backups).
The sync problem at the same time feels more likely and worse, as if the files never touched Google's servers and its sync went and deleted them, there'd be nothing they could do.
Exporting my Google Photos sometimes fails consistently even with lots of attempts. Out of well over 10 export attempts or so this year maybe a single one succeeded. I have a few hundred GB of data stored on that account. I also currently have a support ticket with Google open on that issue, but after initial follow-ups haven't received a response in a couple of months now.
That said my current approach for backing up things is to upload an "age" encrypted version of the data from Google Takeout to Wasabi. Once uploaded I run a script that shows me the diff between the data sets (so that I can ensure that no old data went missing that shouldn't have gone missing) before I delete older data. Probably not the most optimal approach though. Might be better to just set up some versioning layer on top of Wasabi and to keep deleted or modified data forever.
How do you do the diff between the old and new encrypted versions? Do you encrypt and upload the takeout .tar.gz files, or do extract first then encrypt?
For the comparison I pretty much only use the logged hashes which allow me to figure out if any hashes (and associated files) are missing in the new version of the backup. This isn't a perfect solution yet as a few things aren't detected. For example Google Takeout bundles mails in mbox files and I currently don't check for missing mails. It would be better to convert the mbox files to a Maildir first so that the comparison can be done on a per-mail basis.
Does this affect iCloud?
This week I've been noticing I've been unable to open files on my Mac that are stored in Google Drive. I can open them via the web, so I thought it was just the Mac software until I saw this post.
What should the rest of the world do?
(Also, my hats off to you that you're seeing "no surprises." So you never discovered your backup machine has a flaky wifi card or bad Ethernet jack? Never had bit-rot or errors on your backing store, or are you just not detecting them until it's too late? You're testing your local backups regularly to make sure there isn't a script error that means none of those bits can actually be restored? And are you backing up offsite so when your residence burns down you still have your backups?
Lots of us are "backing up" using ad-hoc bespoke solutions that we will discover were broken only when we need them.)
Educate and help those who do not know? I helped setup my cousin’s NAS and gave it a subdomain.
What i meant by no surprises is: the backend and front end stays the same forever, short of me manually updating it. My server and their apps, will not suddenly lose functionality or have cruft added because someone in Mountain View deems so.
Key to making this work is keeping things simple. Meaning no container or any burying of my data under any layer of abstraction. My files are laid bare on the platter, making it very portable because any application that does file system operation can immediately operate on my files. Unlike the clusterfuck that is owncloud.
Every quarter I do an incremental offline backup of all the drives in the NAS, to address all the issues you mentioned.
Let’s see the instructions on that link.
> 2. Install an old version of Google Drive (there's a version 82/83 floating around on the internet).
This is awful advice. If you have a link, share it. Considering the number of people this is affecting, chances are increasing that the version you find “floating around on the internet” is malware.
The windows installer at least is digitally signed to prevent this issue.
I doubt there’s no way to trick people the same way on Windows. Perhaps I’m wrong, and if I am I’d welcome learning how that system works.
Amazing how some folks can't get a job at google if they can't invert a binary tree. Perhaps hire folks with relevant skills rather than folks who can solve 2 leetcode mediums in under 45 mins?
EDIT: upvotes for reality-detached rant, upvotes for "you think you are The One" -2 for a polite concise reality.
It would benefit you to take the downvotes as constructive criticism. You opinions may need recalibration based on feedback.
Bugs happen and this is a serious failure that Google needs to fix. But the idea that incompetents are doing the development or that Google hires puzzle solvers over technical talent is just not true.
Yeah, they do: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
I have been a part of hundreds of hiring decisions at Google, and there is much to hate about the process. But leetcode over qualifications is not one of them.
That's a signal that's trying to tell you something.
> But leetcode over qualifications is not one of them.
A lot of people hate leetcode and the state of interviews at tech companies (17k people liked that tweet), but it looks like you do not.
Tech is probably the only field where you have to study unrelated subject matter than the job you actually end up doing.
> I have been a part of hundreds of hiring decisions at Google
I am curious - I heard that Google is getting rid of its team matching process[1] :
> The rationale is current system outputs a lot of false positive and false negative.
The rumor was that google would do "generalist" (read that to "leetcode") style interviews and then put the candidate in a team matching process, where teams would review the candidate's (who ostensibly got an offer) package, and decide whether or not to bring them on the team.
But then a lot of candidates would get stuck in the team matching phase bc they couldn't find a team to take them on. Machine learning engineers would be presented to teams that needed front end UI devs, which were clearly a mismatch.
Basically, the generalist interview was creating a pool of candidates that passed the generic leetcode interview, but they producing poor matches for what teams at google really needed.
Is that true?
[1] https://www.teamblind.com/post/Google-just-got-easier-no-mor...
> That's a signal that's trying to tell you something.
Indeed, and what it is telling me isn't what your points are about. I'm fairly vocal internally about certain changes I believe need to be made. But I'm also not really in a position to do anything about it but suggest changes.
There have been non-generalist interviews for over ten years, although not for every team. This problem has been addressed several times over the years. I think the post above is about the most recent round. But Cloud and many other orgs have always had their own inteview style.
Generally speaking, the more senior the candidate, the less generalist the interview seeks to be. And the more specialized the role, the less generalist the interview seeks to be. Some interviewers haven't gotten the memo, and many situations end up being, say, 50% generalist, and 50% specific role. But plenty also go purely role-based, especially in areas like security or UX design.
However, one thing Google strongly seeks is someone not wedded to this or that technology. If you think of yourself as, say, a Ruby-on-Rails developer, then you are probably a bad fit for most roles at Google, even the ones that involve Ruby-on-Rails. Google expects you to be able to pick up whatever knowledge you need to do your job, whether that is learning a new framework on the fly, or debugging a system you aren't familiar with. It's not exactly a "generalist", but more like someone who can learn tools and techniques easily.
The consequences seem to manifest into serious technical problems, like losing customer data on its cloud storage service.
From their terms of service, they deleted YOUR data. Thus the rights you'd have when anyone destroys your stuff apply. Hmmm, might even be criminal... I'm not a lawyer though, so I don't know shit.
But saying that "because they can, they can" is silly. I "can" (as in able to) break into your house and steal your shit. By that logic, if I can do it, it wasn't trespassing or theft.
They can because user's agreed to their terms of service --- and by so doing so, relinquished some of their ownership rights.
The total liability of Google, and its suppliers and distributors, for any
claims under these terms, including for any implied warranties, is limited to
the amount you paid us to use the services (or, if the subject of the claim
is the free service, to supplying you the services again).
Like I said, I'm not a lawyer, but just because there is a limit on liability, does not mean there is a limit on damages and tort.
This is exactly what Google intends it to mean. Good luck convincing a judge otherwise.
In some places, the fact there is no signed contract and no exchange took place (free tier) means there is no liability --- the user received everything they paid for.
This same thing applies here. Intellectual property has value. Google agreed to hold that value and not delete it. They stopped holding the property and smashed it. Their liability clause no longer works because they broke the contract. It doesn’t matter if money changed hands or not. Damage is damage.
I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know shit.
Scenario A: I take a photo. There is no backup. Is this my data?
Scenario B: I have multiple independent backups of a document. Google deletes the main copy off my computer against my will. Is that "not my data" because Google deleted it? Does the deletion not count because I have a backup? Third option?
They probably meant trusting a cloud provider can have consequences.
They sure can. Years ago I had a shitty landlord clear an apartment I'd moved 95% of my belongings from but before the term of my lease had ended. Now you may have some legal recourse, but the cost/time associated with litigating a matter like that tends to outweigh the remedy.
If someone can take or destroy your stuff *without* legal recourse, then you don't really "own" it'
You have even less recourse against the average burglar than the average landlord.
???
Where I live, you can literally kill the average burglar for breaking into your home. That is pretty much the ultimate recourse.
If you're not home and the police can find your burglar, you can legally press charges against him/her.
I'm talking about legal recourse after the fact. You can win both cases, at your own expense, but the burglar is much more likely to be judgement-proof.
You can't get blood out of a rock but you can incarcerate it.
But I don't want free revenge, I want my stuff/money back. An actual remedy.
As the Rolling Stones pointed out years ago (maybe before you were born), "You can't always get what you want" --- yadda, yadda, etc., etc..
It is not just about giving you what you want. The fact that *legal* retribution of some sort applies if someone takes or destroys your stuff is a defining characteristic of "ownership".
Anyway I'm still not sure what point you were originally trying to make, because defeating a landlord in court and getting paid back is at least as good of a proof of "ownership".
Both situations have big flaws in the legal recourse, but you definitely have it in both situations.
Though I prefer the one where I get compensation.
The existence of legal standing is what defines the property rights. If you're going to move the goalposts to "you don't own it unless you have legal standing and the means to pursue legal recourse", then you might as well say that only the extremely wealthy have any property rights at all.
The article didn't say anything about the free or paid GDrive accounts. If it is a free account, then that is up for debate. If it impacts the paid consumers, they paid for the service and it is their data.
What rights do the contracts that a paid customer signs with Google say they have over the data?
From what I see in the free terms of service: "You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours." which is neat.
You have the rights to your data, but there doesn't seem to be any stated obligation for Google to keep that data or make it accessible to you.
On a paid account, clearly that's part of the contracted service being provided. There is absolutely an obligation to provide the service you took payment for.
But no, in general in our society, gratis products aren't required to carry warranties, for obvious reasons (no one would provide them if so).
yeah, unless there is a statement sort of like "We reserve the right to terminate accounts in the case of violation of terms of service as determined by our automated systems"
in which case you would need to go to court and get a determination that clearly that is wrong and they can't do that, in general in American society that's how things work.
No recent/active incident for Google Drive is shown:
https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/summary
https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/products/VHNA7p3...