Normally the response to this is, yes, it sucks, but you're not paying Google to host your data.
However, it looks like this journalist did pay Google to host his data. So this immediately puts it in a worse category.
But they've been entrenched for years now, completely dominate so many aspects of the web and get plenty of value out of even their free users.
Given their size and stranglehold on just about everything, pulling an "oops, sorry, I guess you get what you pay for" is just ludicrous at this point.
And sorry if it seems like I'm arguing directly with you, that's not my intention. But I see this a lot and have gone from saying it myself to vehemently disagreeing with it over the last decade or so.
However, as you note, they have been entrenched for years now, and it has been obvious for that same amount of time that they have long since dropped "don't be evil". So while it certainly sucks that they do the things they do, acting surprised when it happens is not a reasonable position at this point. Anyone who expects Google to honor any kind of commitment is simply asking for trouble. I don't trust them for anything.
And if widespread realization of that fact gets people to stop using Google services, so much the better: maybe that would actually get their attention.
Yes, I know about microG, Graphene, F-Droid and the like, but the average person is not going to flash their phone. They will inevitably hit a wall that says "you need to login with Google," create a Google account, and won't ask questions.
Just as an example, my mother-in-law couldn't find her contacts when she bought a new phone. Why? Because she was unknowingly saving her contacts to a Google account she forgot she made.
To the extent this is true, it's not just Google, it's also the phone manufacturers and service providers (like Verizon).
And you don't need to be hackerman to do this, I told my retired parents "you should check out F-Droid" and they did. Now they recommend F-Droid apps to me.
That's why I store only 1 file on my Google Drive - a 10 GB encrypted blob (TrueCrypt partition).
In some cases this kind of relationship auto-regulates itself (e.g., taking a small vs large credit in a bank): at larger scale, both parties are invested into maintaining a good relationship. The problem in this case is, any individual investment into any relationship with Google is just a drop in the ocean.
That's not a suitable analogy for users of Google's free services. A suitable analogy would be, someone is offering free food, but (a) its quality sucks, and (b) they arbitrarily withdraw it from a significant number of people for no good reason. Yes, that's unpleasant, but "well it was free" is a suitable response in that case.
The issue in this particular case, though, is that the journalist was using paid Google services--which is a very different situation.
My organisation (OpenStreetMap) is paying Google to host our emails.
They silently delete random ones, they never arrive at inbox.
(we are preparing migration to competing provider)
Paying does not help.
As I pointed out in the very next sentence of my previous post, yes, in this particular case the journalist was paying.
Then goes and makes new babies.
ok but a farmer that throws their cows down a ditch is arguably much worse than one that milks them.
Funny, because they never seen to have problems hosting the advertising/surveillance data they collect on me. They never went "sorry we can't track you any more for free, will you type in you card number so we can keep surveilling you?"
Google does that by storing my data, many kinds of my data. You making the distinction between data that "the user knows and understands" versus data that "is obscure to the user but advertisers care about" is a matter of marketing, in that as the former is easier to charge the user for.
My point is that the argument of "you're not paying for storing data X therefore fuck you" is a silly one, because you're also not paying for storing data Y, and neither are the advertisers.
That's like saying you don't pay the restaurant for the chef, you pay the restaurant for the food. It's a level of semantics that rises to being simply disingenuous. It's a restaurant, not a grocery.
You can sell ads without targeting. In fact you can even sell ads without users.
Source: I worked years buying and selling online ads.
You can, but that's not really what Google is selling anymore. It's certainly not the only thing Google is selling.
Unless you're making the claim that the data storage that Google uses for their data tracking isn't paid for by the targeted ad service? That if Google suddenly couldn't use that data for targeted advertising anymore that they'd still keep it around, or that none of their other services would raise in price?
> You can, but that's not really what Google is selling anymore.
Wrong again. Google's thing is search ads. Those target keywords, not user data. User data is a side-gig for Google, mostly thru youtube, maps, and gmail.
You are not paying the competition either; so you somewhat paying Google. It's not a direct payment but indirect support
Competition for what? Here we're talking about data hosting. There are plenty of companies that will host huge amounts of data for reasonable prices. And unlike Google, they actually have reasonable terms of service and customer support.