But restaurants explicitly ban doing that. Even all you can eat restaurants don't let you take out food. Google never hinted at having a maximum limit. Theres no reason to believe or expect that unlimited actually means some arbitrary limit that google just came up with after you signed up. Your analogy would've been better if the journo tried hosting a file share service using his drive account as a back end or something but that's not what happened
To anyone who thinks google is lying by calling this "unlimited" consider this:
When you go to a restaurant they will serve you free water and give you free napkins. If you asked the waitress how much water you were allowed to have she would probably say "as much as you want". This does not mean you can connect a hose to their water supply and start selling the water. You can not pull up with a large truck and start unloading boxes of their napkins because you can have "as much as you want".
There are common sense limitations on unlimited services, and I do not think google is crossing any lines here.
Bringing up false advertising demonstrates a clear misconception that I think is central to your misunderstanding. A claim of false advertising is predicated on the foundation that a reasonable person could have been mislead. But no reasonable person could be mislead into thinking that Google was offering actually unlimited storage, since it is clear to any reasonable person that such a thing is impossible. “Unlimited” is a perfectly acceptable shorthand for “unlimited as far as nearly all users can tell, interested users are welcome to read the full text of the legal contract agreement for more information”.
Olive Garden, after all, cannot actually provide you with “unlimited breadsticks” either.
Can we please dispel this notion that “unlimited” means literally unbounded to the point of absurdity. Seemingly everyone understands that bottomless breadsticks doesn’t mean that Olive Garden literally has infinite breadsticks and that you’re not allow to show up with a semi and tell them to fill it up.
Unlimited means that you don’t have a set quota and as long as your usage doesn’t cross over into genuine abuse of the service that you don’t have to worry about it. If you cat /dev/random into your unlimited storage provider 24/7/365 you can’t really be surprised when they ban you.
Unlimited did mean unlimited though. There was probably some sort of limit but this guy never in fact hit it. But Google stopped offering unlimited storage (probably because of people like this who would store 100s of TB). They notified him of this months before discontinuing the service and he apparently made no effort to find a different storage solution, maybe because it would be really expensive to store that much data in the cloud anywhere else. Did he think they would just continue to store the data indefinitely? That doesn't strike me as a reasonable assumption to make.
No. All-you-can-eat is a simple concept. Everybody understands that. You go there, eat until you're satisfied, and then you pay. There is no lie to be found.
Unlimited is a different but equally simple concept with universally accepted meaning: no limits. Companies should not be able to twist this meaning while enjoying the benefits of their deceptive marketing. They can't just lie to their consumers, cash in and then pull the rug from under them later because they violated their assumptions about likely usage patterns. They sold the consumers unlimited usage and assumed they would not use it. Some crazy person actually decided to use the service to the fullest possible extent? They must honor their promises.
Unlimited is an actual word with a fairly clear definition (unlike, say, 'natural'), and reasonable people assume that when someone says 'unlimited', what they mean is 'unlimited by anything other than natural constraints' -- such as, is the case with an 'unlimited buffet', the amount you can eat in one sitting.
This is not dissimilar to internet service; you're limited by the available bandwidth to a certain amount of transit you can consume in a period of time.
If businesses don't actually mean 'unlimited', then they can say what they do mean. 2TB? 4TB? 10TB?
All-you-can-eat is a simple concept. Everybody understands that.
No, not everybody does, which is why they have to have signs saying you can't take food home.
Unlimited is a different but equally simple concept with universally accepted meaning: no limits. Companies should not be able to twist this meaning while enjoying the benefits of their deceptive marketing.
"Unlimited backup (of data stored on the internal storage of a single personal-use laptop or desktop running Windows or MacOS X)" is not fundamentally different from "Bottomless coffee (consumed by one person only in a single visit)" or "A year's supply of fuel (really a $3000 balance fuel card)". There's a "reasonable person" standard here, and the man on the Clapham Omnibus knows that these sorts of offers have fine print which it behoves you to read.
Unhelpful perspective, honestly. Of course there’s a limit on anything “unlimited”, the world is finite. This is a distinction that adults don’t have to make except when they are perhaps talking to small children. And besides, it’s not like Google ever promised anyone “unlimited” anything. The contract says “unlimited, unless we decide to change something”. Getting up in arms about the literal wording while ignoring the fact that only the literal wording of the contract matters is also unhelpful.
No, Google flat out lying by calling something that is limited as “unlimited” is why we can’t have nice things. I don’t understand why anyone would go out of their way to defend blatant liars.
Google advertised unlimited. By definition that means without limits. To then put limits is to make the plan limited. Instead of doing thesemental gymnastics to defend Google might I suggest that the people storing petabytes of data are taking advantage of Google's goodwill but not doing anything inherently wrong. That being said Google calling the people who use petabytes abusive is hypocritical, and wrong. Google wants a certain type of user that overpays for "unlimited" and uses a pittance. Instead Google found that they advertised themselves into a pickle and are trying to blame people using the service as advertised.
Google can either advertise unlimited and live with the costs or advertise what they're actually willing to provide. Users using a service within the advertised constraints is not abuse.
I really disagree with this type of literalism. Everybody knows nothing is really unlimited. It's marketing aimed at the naive.
I have no problem with banging on Google for offering "unlimited" things without telling you what the limits actually are. But at some point, you have to expect some level of knowledge and sophistication from the users. I think accumulating 237Tb of data is well past the point where you should not just take "unlimited" at face value, ask hard questions about exactly what the limits of what they're offering are, and move to a better supported service, even if it costs some money.
It's probably also time to re-think - do you really need 237Tb? That's a huge amount of data. Is this like raw 4k HD video of every interview you've ever done, uncut? Maybe it's time to cut down on things a bit.
A reasonable amount which they did. There was nothing bad faith about this. Google did offer unlimited space, people abused the crap out of it, they changed it. This is literally just childish behavior.
Unlimited offers have always implicit limits which every adult understands. When you go to the all you can eat buffet there's a common sense understanding that you can't literally fill your pockets with a thousand bucks worth of food.
Most unlimited services operate like all you can eat buffets. There is some secondary constraint that keeps usage bounded. I.e. the person's ability to eat food.
I don't think your 744 hours argument makes sense. That's not your limit. Interpret it as "all you can eat"; if I can't eat anymore, that's not really a limit with the service.
Again, I don't see how your interpretation is a valid one. You limit the service based on usage. This is not "unlimited". If your cut the service off after one hour per month, would that be unlimited? I imagine you wouldn't consider it to be so. So what's the difference, aside from degree?
I don't imagine I'm putting forth new arguments. But I still don't understand: why call it "unlimited" when it's not? It seems clear enough that people don't expect your definition of the word when they see it, and haven't for at least 15 years, so why keep using it when it's known to be misleading?
I haven't seen any buffet advertize itself as offering "unlimited" food, but rather they say "all-you-can-eat" and then typically clearly clarify on the door and the front desk something like "on our premises, in under 2 hours".
Google should have been smart enough to not say "unlimited" if they don't mean it.
"In general, I, like most of us, hate ISPs who advertise "unlimited" data"
It's unlimited which does not mean there aren't limitations. For example an "all you can eat" buffet means all you can eat in one visit and also means you can't expect to take home what you don't eat. Likewise unlimited would typically come with some restrictions and expectation that you aren't watching movies 24x7 but more like a normal person might (call it 12 hours x 30 days?).
"So instead of advertising as "unlimited", why not say "Use as much as you want upto xyz GB". "
Well for one thing most end users wouldn't have an idea of what that means. So right there that would be a fail in the brains of most normals. How many people can translate "x" gb or tb into something that means "I can watch 10 movies a night". So I guess that is the answer but then again they actually might not even realize how much bandwidth email takes or visits to the amazon store. Hence "unlimited" is much easier.
By the way at the 7-11 they don't say "you can have 10 ketchup packs" because then everyone might take 10 ketchup packs because it says they can. Leaving the ketchup and allowing people to take what they feel is right typically results in less usage overall.
> Unlimited is a marketing term used to express simply to the consumer there are not overall limits placed on your storage provided you adhere to the rest of the terms of service.
Well, that's doublespeak then, and if someone calls them out on it by actually testing the claim they make, so be it.
I don't understand why people seem not to mind being lied to their faces, as long as it's "just marketing".
You can't stretch the definition of unlimited. There is literaly no amount that would stretch it. If you advertise unlimited storage, you are bending the truth, since there is no such thing as unlimited disk space. I don't see how anyone can blame the data hoarders here. Where I live, if you advertise for something that you cannot deliver, it's called fraud and you can get sued for it. I just don't see why they feel the need to lie to customers like that.
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