Comment by doodlebugging | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doodlebugging | Hacker News Reader

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>I see no reason why we should expect a company to keep providing storage for dormant accounts beyond 2 years though.

Remember when Google said they would hold on to everything that their users did on their site forever? People were concerned about the privacy implications, etc. and how a part of their lives that maybe they didn't want anyone to know about would be out there, probably for sale, forever.

Well as far as I'm concerned Google made their bed and now they get to lie in it. Don't piss down my neck and tell me it's raining. They promised (or threatened, or noted) that they would hold onto it forever and that storage costs were manageable, etc. They need to be held to it.

In my case that means they get to archive all my junk mail (a few hundred emails with account info for places I might never visit again) since that is the sole purpose of my gmail account and I haven't intentionally used google search in years since DuckDuckGo showed up as an option.

This is actually funny to me. Life caught up with them and forever ended up being a much more normal, physically quantifiable time period that fit nicely in less than a human lifetime. But still, they should be forced to live up to their promises, or threats, etc.

> Remember when Google said they would hold on to everything that their users did on their site forever?

Err, no, as a matter of fact I don't. Would you have a cite for this?

it's probably a wishful interpretation from the initial coverage, https://slashdot.org/story/04/04/01/0038200/googles-gmail-to... "hey want to offer their searching capabilities so that users can search through their entire set of e-mail, I guess forever. "

https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message... "Storage: Google believes people should be able to hold onto their mail forever. That’s why Gmail comes with 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of free storage – more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offer."

(at the time, I thought it meant forever, silly me)

Right. What I remember from the time was that Gmail's big thing was it had so much free storage that you could archive emails instead of deleting them. Previously people generally would delete most emails to save space, and Gmail changed that.

There was nothing about saving all your emails forever no matter what even if you stopped using the product. It was never presented as a lifetime backup archive to be accessed decades later. Just tons more quota than competitors was all.

And now the GMail storage limit for free users is 15 GB, 15x what it launched with. I think it's rather naïve to expect that any free service will give you unlimited space or unlimited time. A 2-year inactivity period sounds reasonable to me. Literally all you need to do is log in once in 2 years to not have your account deleted. I often disagree with Google's handling of things, but this isn't one such instance.

And set up Google Inactive Account Manager* so that in case you unexpectedly pass away, somebody you trust gets access to your account after a set period. I've set mine to 3 months because I'm online so much, but you may find 6 or 12 months to work better for you.

* https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en

> at the time, I thought it meant forever, silly me

Nothing is forever. Any time any company is promising something that is "unlimited" or "forever", they're lying. They have to be, because the economics of holding true to infinities preclude them.

What kind of weird entitlement is this?

Whatever the sense of entitlement behind it, it would be nice to have the public reminded of this walkback, so that Google's future statements and promises can be interpreted with appropriate degree of skepticism.

Let it be known that I have no particular love for Google (nor any corporation of significant enough size for that matter).

That being said I can not say I understand what is being conveyed in the original comment nor by yours.

Google at some point promised free storage of stuff, and for some reason these comments try to make it sound criminal that they are now backtracking on that, even if it is in the case of accounts that have not so much as twitched in two years.

If we were talking about a promise they had made to keep all your data (for which you pay them to keep) completely out of their ad business, and then years down the line that promise would get reversed, well then this line of reasoning would make sense.

They are a corporation giving free stuff. More shouldn't be needed for your spider sense to tingle.

You haven’t changed your mind on anything in 20 years?

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