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Comment by hm8 | Hacker News Reader

Like the author notes, I don't think the problem was with Google. It was no fault of theirs. The reason: It's a fine line between maintaining privacy policies and managing such events. If google were storing/caching these links, there would have been an outcry from those worried about user privacy and stuff.

About the by-the-hour downloads, well there again is a trade-off between providing data quickly and doing a lazy evaluation.

I think, as the author notes, it was just an unfortunate event that was a consequence of good design decisions gone bad circumstantially and wreaking havoc for the author.

It was certainly nice of Amazon to have made that refund. The resources (read bandwidth) were used after all.

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Google are presumably storing/caching these photos for an hour before expiring and redownloading them.

I don't see why Google don't redownload them using If-Modified-Since, and reusing the original downloaded photos in the case that the origin server says they've not changed.

I don't understand the privacy concern - a publicly accessible URL doesn't offer any privacy. It's the same as a transparent proxy.

A password works by there is a piece of text that only you know, and thus, when you give that password to a server, that server knows who you are.

can't you also view a url as a password? (If only I know the url, then only I can download the file).

I am able to give out a url to someone else, so they can access the file, likewise, I can give out my file server's username and password, and whoever has it can also access my files.

You have a point, but the difference is that url's are not usually considered secret and are therefore not treated the same way a password would be. For example in the browser..

Google is already storing urls to those files.

I think it is primarily a legal concern. Legally, caching public content is not always an acceptable (or at least clear-cut) practice. I concur in thinking that's a little silly, but enough people disagree for it to be an issue that Google has to take into account.

There have been similar complaints about attempts to aggregate the contents of Hacker News posts, for example.

> If google were storing/caching these links, there would have been an outcry from those worried about user privacy and stuff.

Where would we be without Google taking such a noble and strongly principled stance on user privacy, applied equally and consistently, striving to avoid legal responsibility, even when it costs unrelated parties thousands of dollars.

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