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Photobucket (remember them!) kept hundreds and hundreds of photos in my account with them despite complete inactivity for over a decade. I simply forgot the ac
by cj 3y ago
Photobucket (remember them!) kept hundreds and hundreds of photos in my account with them despite complete inactivity for over a decade.
I simply forgot the account existed, and remembered one day to find a ton of amazing decade old photos.
There’s something to be said for doing things that earn your company respect from consumers. Had photobucket deleted my decade old photos because I didn’t log in frequently enough, I’d be pissed and wouldn’t use them in the future. If a small photo storage company can afford to keep customer photos for decade+ with no login, I hope Google can store some text emails for at least 5 years.
Re: the jail/health issue, making sure Google doesn’t delete my account would (literally) be the last thing on my todo list if I were on my way to prison or a coma.
- dingusdew 3y agoSee, I read this situation as entirely differently. Google is not being unreasonable in understanding that they can't afford to store all data from everyone indefinitely. They are not being unreasonable that it is a potential security risk. Where they are being unreasonable is that they have basically gotten everyone addicted to their "free" product, and then, a decade after promoting the idea that no one should run their own services, they should just use free offers in the cloud: they are now admitting the downsides to this arrangement. That Google account that your dead friend had that you keep on your buddy list because it gives you memories? Gone. That Facebook account with your dead family members photos and timeline? Gone. The Twitter account with all the tweets from you child who died too soon? Gone. The lesson should be that if you're hoping for someone else to be the steward of all your digital histories, you're in for a bad time. If you're on someone else's servers, you're bound by their rules, because much like going to their building, you are on their private property. The thing is, they spent over a decade making sure that people trusted that their data would always be there, and that storing it in someone else's private property indefinitely, somehow, wasn't a problem. It was always a problem. If you want to keep your data indefinitely, you have to know how to store it yourself on your own storage mediums that you keep in your own home and on your own computers/servers. So, Google is currently doing nothing wrong, based on the realities of security and cost of data storage. The wrong they did was convincing users for over a decade that this wouldn't happen, knowing full well that eventually it would.
- tivert 3y ago> That Google account that your dead friend had that you keep on your buddy list because it gives you memories? Gone. That Facebook account with your dead family members photos and timeline? Gone. The Twitter account with all the tweets from you child who died too soon? Gone. And unless you're the account owner, good luck archiving any of that. I believe Facebook is extremely hostile to scraping, and I don't think Twitter is very easy, either.
- ajross 3y ago> Photobucket (remember them!) kept hundreds and hundreds of photos in my account Photobucket doesn't even offer free service anymore. Isn't this proving the opposite of your point? They couldn't afford to do what you're asking, so they stopped.
- pizza 3y agoIt’s hard to say from outside the org whether they did it because the costs were too high rather than because someone just wanted to so it to make even more money per new user