5 ms·

It's not about sensitive data. It's about email, calendar, drive and other google services you use and rely on for your daily work.

jamesaguilar 14y ago
You should not rely on services you're not paying for and don't own for your daily work. :-/ My point isn't about the nature of the data that was stored, my point was the economic reliability of the tool being used to store it. In other words, you want the provider to have some significant incentive not to screw you if your livelihood depends on it.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 14y ago
  It's a calculated risk. Chances of this happening to any given person so far has proven to be almost infinitesimal, so people (rationally) don't care and treat GMail like they treat electricity. But yes, if this indeed happens to you and you were depending on Google services for your work and life, you're completely screwed. Sometimes I feel afraid of this happening to me, but I don't know where to move some of my data to, as every other mail/calendar service I know sucks hard in comparison to GMail and Google Calendar.
  - jamesaguilar 14y ago
    Enterprise apps accounts are pretty cheap compared to your average business expense. Not speaking as a googler, just a concerned fellow hacker. That might not perfectly insulate you from risk, but I guess (again, without any internal knowledge, I don't work on this stuff) that it cuts it by another factor of ten or more.
- coldtea 14y ago
  >You should not rely on services you're not paying for Whereas you should rely on services you're paying for? How are they different? Terms of service even for paid services are BS anyway, and it's not like you will sue them.
  - jamesaguilar 14y ago
    Because I believe P(service available to me | I'm paying for it) is higher than P(service available to me | I'm not paying for it) for most services where both are an option. I'm not going to go into all the reasons for that belief. I'm sure you're a creative person and can guess some of them. Suffice it to say that I think there is some reason to believe it. If you don't, by all means run your important business processes off of charity-ware.
    - coldtea 14y ago
      Seems like a fallacy to me. It's not as clear cut as the P vs P you make it be, anyway. In many cases you're better of with Google that with some _small_ paying service your paying $20/month to use, merely because Google has more money/people/tech to spend on making the service better, avoiding to fall under, etc. As for paying a _large_ company to their service, well, if you're like 0.001% of the profits of the service you're paying for, you're not much of a customer with influence, no matter how much you pay. And in most pay-for services you are just that, a small decimal percentage of their business. Now you could count on your interests aligned with the other customers (so that they could not annoy you without annoying a large percentage of their users) but there lots of cases where that's not the case.
      - jamesaguilar 14y ago
        I'm not sure what kind of fallacy it would be that I make decisions based on my rationally derived probability estimates. If there is such a fallacy I would love to hear about it.
        coldtea 14y ago
        >I'm not sure what kind of fallacy it would be that I make decisions based on my rationally derived probability estimates. If there is such a fallacy I would love to hear about it. The fallacy that those are "rationally derived probability estimates" instead of numbers pulled out of one's arse in the first place. What gave you the impression that putting random intuition numbers on the P(paid)/P(free) boxes makes it "rationally derived"? If you didn't do that, what's your methodology, and where are the source numbers of your empirical research one the matter?

jamesaguilar 14y ago

You should not rely on services you're not paying for and don't own for your daily work. :-/ My point isn't about the nature of the data that was stored, my point was the economic reliability of the tool being used to store it. In other words, you want the provider to have some significant incentive not to screw you if your livelihood depends on it.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
TeMPOraL 14y ago
It's a calculated risk. Chances of this happening to any given person so far has proven to be almost infinitesimal, so people (rationally) don't care and treat GMail like they treat electricity. But yes, if this indeed happens to you and you were depending on Google services for your work and life, you're completely screwed. Sometimes I feel afraid of this happening to me, but I don't know where to move some of my data to, as every other mail/calendar service I know sucks hard in comparison to GMail and Google Calendar.
- jamesaguilar 14y ago
  Enterprise apps accounts are pretty cheap compared to your average business expense. Not speaking as a googler, just a concerned fellow hacker. That might not perfectly insulate you from risk, but I guess (again, without any internal knowledge, I don't work on this stuff) that it cuts it by another factor of ten or more.
coldtea 14y ago
>You should not rely on services you're not paying for Whereas you should rely on services you're paying for? How are they different? Terms of service even for paid services are BS anyway, and it's not like you will sue them.
- jamesaguilar 14y ago
  Because I believe P(service available to me | I'm paying for it) is higher than P(service available to me | I'm not paying for it) for most services where both are an option. I'm not going to go into all the reasons for that belief. I'm sure you're a creative person and can guess some of them. Suffice it to say that I think there is some reason to believe it. If you don't, by all means run your important business processes off of charity-ware.
  - coldtea 14y ago
    Seems like a fallacy to me. It's not as clear cut as the P vs P you make it be, anyway. In many cases you're better of with Google that with some _small_ paying service your paying $20/month to use, merely because Google has more money/people/tech to spend on making the service better, avoiding to fall under, etc. As for paying a _large_ company to their service, well, if you're like 0.001% of the profits of the service you're paying for, you're not much of a customer with influence, no matter how much you pay. And in most pay-for services you are just that, a small decimal percentage of their business. Now you could count on your interests aligned with the other customers (so that they could not annoy you without annoying a large percentage of their users) but there lots of cases where that's not the case.
    - jamesaguilar 14y ago
      I'm not sure what kind of fallacy it would be that I make decisions based on my rationally derived probability estimates. If there is such a fallacy I would love to hear about it.
      - coldtea 14y ago
        >I'm not sure what kind of fallacy it would be that I make decisions based on my rationally derived probability estimates. If there is such a fallacy I would love to hear about it. The fallacy that those are "rationally derived probability estimates" instead of numbers pulled out of one's arse in the first place. What gave you the impression that putting random intuition numbers on the P(paid)/P(free) boxes makes it "rationally derived"? If you didn't do that, what's your methodology, and where are the source numbers of your empirical research one the matter?