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> only for Google Cloud customers for which there's no payment required as far as I can tell—just creating a Google Cloud account.
by lights0123 5y ago
> only for Google Cloud customers
for which there's no payment required as far as I can tell—just creating a Google Cloud account.
- mcpherrinm 5y agoI think you do have to have a payment card on file, even if there’s no payments to be made.
- onion2k 5y ago... which is how they connect your account to who you are (or who you work for), so they can extract value from your social graph instead. As the adage goes, if it's free you are the product, not the customer.
- derefr 5y agoGCP, AWS, other IaaS providers, and more generally, any "post-paid" service company, needs your credit card, because the services these providers provide allow users to generate costs that can only be measured after-the-fact; and where those costs greatly exceed the free-plan limits, the provider wants to be able to pass those costs to the user. As well, post-paid providers rely on credit-card billing information to deduplicate/KYC users. Without this sort of information, an, er, "ingenious" user could just sign up for a million free-tier accounts and lash them together into a quota-evading resource-sucking behemoth.
- onion2k 5y agoSure. All that is true. And the credit card number ties your free GCE account to your profile with credit agencies that ad companies use to improve their targeting. It's not one thing or the other. It's both.
- derefr 5y agoDo you think it's really that valuable for Google to spend engineering hours on an ad-targeting integration that will only improve targeting for maybe ~100k users at most? And probably far less, actually. As many GCP users as there might be in the world, most of them are IT staff working for some-or-another enterprise; where that enterprise only has a single GCP billing-account administrator. Nobody else in the enterprise has their card on file. (And that billing-account administrator's card-on-file is just a corporate credit card, that tells you what the corporation buys, but tells you nothing about the individual. And their email is just a group/alias — billing@ or somesuch. Impossible to log into; impossible to browse the web as; no way to target ads at.) You'd think the long tail of individual accounts could have more value, but those are the same users who GCP is least interested in recruiting to their platform, and the ones whose entered data is least trustworthy, because of all the spammers and crypto-miners attempting to use stolen credit cards to pay for service. You want to bind some poor random Joe's card-hubbed ad-profile to a spoke created by the person who stole their identity? That's negative average ad-targeting ROI!
- mlindner 5y agoFor now. They've changed free things to not free things many times in the past. Or started restricting features once it gets popular. Don't depend on it for anything you want to last a while.
- brazzledazzle 5y agoI’m certainly overlooking something but the risk seems small since it uses an open standard. You should be able to fallback to another acme provider right?
- danielheath 5y agoYeah, but... given there are other ACME providers, why would I choose one from the a company with googles reputation for sunsetting products?
- minerva23 5y agoAs a Let’s Encrypt user and fan, I can answer this. LE is great, but their SLO is significantly below our customers’ expectations. For us, Google wouldn’t replace LE, it would supplement LE for higher reliability. Seeing more providers conforming to ACME at a price point of “free” is great for the ecosystem.
- tehbeard 5y agoIs this with provisioning many new certs? The recommended renewal cycle gives you a 30 day lead on failure becoming a problem, plenty of time for multiple retries or recovery processes to use an alternate. The only issues I've ran into, have stemmed from DNS for wildcard certs, where a client's DNS provider is... pretty crap about updating records despite low ttls being set.
- michaelt 5y agoSome people on the cloud like to issue a certificate per machine, so no ACME = no new VMs.
- ipaddr 5y agoAside from providing a credit card that you give permission for google to hold and make transactions against.
- matyasrichter 5y agoDon't be ridiculous. Google isn't a scam company that would charge your card for no reason.
- zippydonk 5y agoYou’ve never put your own credit card on public cloud, I take it? Random, mysterious charges are practically a sport.
- csnweb 5y agoI did with several public cloud providers, including google cloud. Didn’t had any charges for something I didn’t order once.
- michaelt 5y agoBut what if I were to lend my old android tablet to my visiting 4-year-old nephew, and I found they'd used my linked credit card to spend $500 on lootboxes in whalecraft? Google is pretty famous for their nonexistent customer support, so I can't expect satisfaction there. And a chargeback would risk getting my entire account blocked.
- magicalist 5y ago> But what if I were to lend my old android tablet to my visiting 4-year-old nephew, and I found they'd used my linked credit card to spend $500 on lootboxes in whalecraft? Google cloud billing doesn't use google pay, so...nothing?
- ipaddr 5y agoI won't wade into if Google is a scam company, scam companies usually offer a support option they ignore which is more than can be said about google. You gave them permission to bill for a reason. They decide the reason and amount and you pay. Seems risky without support.
- upsidesinclude 5y agoNo payment in cash. If it's Google, you're paying Edot: Absolutely zero surprise this is getting voted to nowhere. CHEERS
- judge2020 5y agoThey don't use GCP data whatsoever for ads. Thinking they'd peep into cloud customer data for the advertising boost (besides the small data point 'visited hostname console.cloud.google.com') is just as irrational as thinking Amazon would leverage AWS to look into Walmarts' suppliers' data to gain a competitive advantage.
- RL_Quine 5y agoExpecting good will of Google at this point seems sort of silly given repeating pattern of betrayal of trust.
- antonvs 5y agoGoogle Cloud is very different from Google's consumer product and advertising side. It has revenues of $13 billion which all comes directly from customers paying them money, not indirectly via advertising etc. Larger companies sign agreements with Google that cover what it does and doesn't promise, and enterprise companies are their highest priority target market. Google Cloud has its own CEO, Thomas Kurian, previously president of product development at Oracle, who was at Oracle for over 20 years. The pattern you're referring to really doesn't apply to this business. If anything it's the opposite: Kurian's goal is to make Gcloud more like Oracle, and part of that involves making sure enterprise customers don't need to be skittish about the kinds of concerns you seem to be thinking of.
- woadwarrior01 5y agoIt's still losing money[1], which means that it's still cross subsidized by the ads business. [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/02/with-a-22b-run-rate-does-it-matter-if-google-cloud-still-loses-money/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/02/with-a-22b-run-rate-does-i...
- neiman 5y agoFor me creating an account is a sort of payment.
- kerng 5y agoAnd the risk that Google AI decides you are not worthy, your account is deactivated and you loose access to this in the same second. Centralization with no accountability besides blaming things on AI is problematic.