9 ms·

"We may terminate the Agreement or restrict, suspend or terminate your use of the Service at our discretion without notice at any time, including if we determin

by ivank 12y ago

"We may terminate the Agreement or restrict, suspend or terminate your use of the Service at our discretion without notice at any time, including if we determine that your use violates the Agreement, is improper, substantially exceeds or differs from normal use by other users, or otherwise involves fraud or misuse of the Service or harms our interests or those of another user of the Service." http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=201376540&ref_=cd_tou_fp&?ref_=cd_unlimited_tou http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...

untog 12y ago
Is this different to any other cloud storage provider?
- ldonley 12y ago
  No, this is pretty typical in terms and conditions for cloud storage providers.
  - dayone 12y ago
    After foundation db leaving users in lurch, i'll be more careful while trusting other products.
j_s 12y ago
We also reserve the right to suspend or end the Services at any time at our discretion and without notice. https://www.dropbox.com/terms https://www.dropbox.com/terms
- Dewie 12y ago
  So I guess the conclusion is that no mainstream cloud service is to be relied on.
  - hengheng 12y ago
    Well, these big services probably close down as often as an end user sees their hard drive fail.
    - belorn 12y ago
      This is not about a company closing down. Its about a company deciding to close their services for a user, arbitrarily, at their own discretion. Files you upload can be permanent deleted, at any time, at the whim of the service provider or any of their employees. You have no rights and no appeals.
    - Dewie 12y ago
      The difference is that a user doesn't feel like just using his computer normally gives him any backup. But if his folder is inside Dropbox, he might be lulled into a sense of comfort since he thinks of Dropbox as a kind of backup[1]. So if he uses Dropbox instead of just using his plain old computer (hard drive), then he might start to get more careless than when he didn't feel that he had a safety net. [1] Though personally I would disagree.
  - dfinninger 12y ago
    https://owncloud.org/ https://owncloud.org/
    - sz4kerto 12y ago
      Can't your hosting provider terminate your contract?
      - vinceguidry 12y ago
        Use multiple services and replicate between them.
        zkhalique 12y ago
        May as well use MaidSafe or Freenet
skizm 12y ago
"...if we determine that your use [...] substantially exceeds or differs from normal use by other users..." Why even bother putting "Unlimited" if they are just going to kick off the power users?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - Vexs 12y ago
    I think it's a reasonable thing to say on their part, it allows them to deal with weird cases, or errors that upload thousands of copies of the same file or something. It's just coverall-contracting.
    - izacus 12y ago
      And, don't forget, allows them to ban users who actually take them up on "Unlimited" clause and then cost them more as they pay.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    Suspicion of what? Suspicion of actually taking them on their word when they advertise it as "unlimited"?
    - gfodor 12y ago
      warez edit: why downvotes? OP asked what person would be suspicious of, the answer (right or wrong) is piracy.
      - vidarh 12y ago
        My question was rhetorical. The problem is that their advertising is false - it is not unlimited when they put all kinds of restrictions on it. When their restrictions are unspecified it just makes matters worse, because it means I as a user has no recourse if they decide to shut down my account.
middleclick 12y ago
I have never come across a provider which doesn't have similar if not same ToS.
agildehaus 12y ago
They could also lose your files without notice due to some major technical glitch. Never rely 100% on anything.
- louis-paul 12y ago
  This new service probably leverages Amazon S3, which is designed to sustain 99.999999999% durability over a given year. That means it is not supposed to lose more than one file among 100,000,000 in a thousand years. That's pretty reliable.
JohnTHaller 12y ago
All the major cloud providers include clauses like this. Service is at their discretion. There is no uptime agreement. No guarantee your files will be there an hour from now. NEVER keep important things only on a cloud service with no backups and no guarantee of service.
newobj 12y ago
"I reserve the right to just crash and lose all your stuff." -- Your hard drive "Me too." -- Your backup hard drive "I also reserve the right to be stolen, dropped, burned up in a fire, or thrown out by your partner during a cleaning jag." -- Your hard drives in general
- ploxiln 12y ago
  "We sold you unlimited. But if you go over the secret threshold, we'll delete your account." -- Amazon This is why I hate "unlimited" in general. It's not unlimited, just tell me what the damn limit is.
  - danudey 12y ago
    The key to 'unlimited' services is that the rate at which most users accrue stored data is slower than the rate at which storage becomes cheaper. That is to say, in the time it takes for your data to go from 1 GB to 10 GB, their cost-per-GB has gone down by >90%.
  - rsync 12y ago
    Unlimited services put the user in an antagonistic relationship with the provider: http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-storage-services-vs-rsyncnet.html http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stora...
_pmf_ 12y ago
The chances of one of the hip companies going out of business is much, much higher for the average user than the chances of Amazon terminating their service. Amazon is not Google; I wouldn't put anything on Drive, given their history of product cancellations.
- kbenson 12y ago
  I'm not sure it's quite that simple. A smaller company doing this may go out of business, but Amazon may decide to stop for any number of simpler reasons, including but not limited to: - Deciding that this isn't a lucrative service - Deciding that it's had the desired effect on competition and served it's purpose - Releasing another service that they decide competes with this but is better
- pgodzin 12y ago
  None of the cancellations have been of core services, which Drive definitely is.
  - _pmf_ 12y ago
    > None of the cancellations have been of core services, which Drive definitely is. What prevents them from redefining a core service to a non-core service on the go?
    - pgodzin 12y ago
      The amount of users. All the shutdowns, like Reader, have been very niche markets with orders of magnitude fewer users that Drive
- msabalau 12y ago
  Given that Amazon managed to "disappear" Orwell e-books that people bought from Amazon, before backpedaling, in the face of outrage and the overwhelming irony, I'm not certain I'd view them as an exemplary actor. Regardless, bunches of people offering free storage allows for a pleasing redundancy.
atmosx 12y ago
I think the best practice is to use the following backup scheme: - 1st line: your computer's HD. - 2nd line: your SOHO NAS (very cheap these days, I have a 2 + 2 (mirror) TB NAS) - 3rd line: remote backup The sensitive info should be encrypted at your computer, possibly with an encryption software that is easy to use everywhere (e.g. GPG). I can't think of any real-life scenario where these 3 copies get destroyed simultaneously. Now the real problem here is upstream. In 3rd world countries like mine (Greece), we have an avg upstream of less than 100 kb/s. So if my pictures/video/pc/whatever backup is > 50 GB, uploading it anywhere is a pain.
- CPLX 12y ago
  Not to totally derail this thread, but what do you recommend for SOHO NAS brands and models for this type of use case?
  - atmosx 12y ago
    Anything that supports RAID1 would do for me. I had a ReadyNAS in the past but now I have a cheap 2-bay D-Link[1] with 2 + 2 TB of Western Digital HDs installed. The important thing is the PSU which should support both power supply AND ethernet[2]. This setup is for just family pictures, documents and some family video that is all backed up via TimeMachine. My code is on bitbucket/github. Some work documents are on Google drive too. ReadyNAS are way better especially the ones with INTEL cpus, since they can transcode video on the fly for some media players that require such a thing (e.g. you could stream video to your iPhone/iPad). But these are expensive and I don't need this kind of functionality. If I had more than 5-10 TB of data to backup then I'd for a custom tower, 8 GB of memory, Gbit Ethernet of course and + FreeNAS (ZFS + FreeBSD network stack). [1] http://amzn.to/1CSugSb http://amzn.to/1CSugSb [2] The ReadyNAS got toasted through ethernet by a thunder!!! [3] http://www.freenas.org http://www.freenas.org
ideonexus 12y ago
Amazon may actually be fair and enforce this legitimately, but I was once burned badly by the promise of "Unlimited Storage." Bluehost offered this, always with an asterisk*, and I assumed it was legitimate. So I tried to upload 20 gigs of home videos and family photos to share with my relatives. Next thing I know, all of my sites are 404ing, and when I call Bluehost, the tech tells me they shut down my hosting service because I was "abusing their unlimited storage." Then they pointed me to the asterisk that says unlimited storage isn't really unlimited and is whatever they feel like it should be on a case-by-case basis. Then I had to sit there on the phone with them and delete all my recently uploaded files before they would put my websites back online. caveat emptor
- crazy1van 12y ago
  Had this happen to me in the 90's with a dial up internet provider. The ISP said it was unlimited usage. So we had a second phone line in our house online a big chunk of the day. Eventually we got a bill with a very large "dedicated line fee" because we were dialed in too much. After enough complaining they removed the charge, but it was a good lesson that "unlimited" services backed by a finite resource are never truly unlimited.
jrochkind1 12y ago
Dropbox ToS: "We also reserve the right to suspend or end the Services at any time at our discretion and without notice. " https://www.dropbox.com/terms https://www.dropbox.com/terms And Google's: > We are constantly changing and improving our Services. We may add or remove functionalities or features, and we may suspend or stop a Service altogether... Google may also stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits to our Services at any time. http://www.google.com/policies/terms/ http://www.google.com/policies/terms/ (that's where a link to Terms of Service from Google Drive page at takes https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2450387?hl=en https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2450387?hl=en you, those general Google ToS) For better or for worse, nearly every ToS you will see anywhere includes a provision like this.
- oaktowner 12y ago
  Of course. Because what is the alternative? "We guarantee that we will operate this service for the next 1000 years, regardless of global warming, pestilence, famine and war?" Nothing lives forever. No company lives forever. Amazon, Microsoft, Google...may all go away some day. And, of course, they may change their business focus and decide to go a different way. I would expect any of them to provide notice and let people get their data out...but one should always assume that a service will go away at some point.
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
    Yeah, there's really two things here. 1) Shutting down the service entirely; 2) shutting off _your_ account in particular. Or really, also 3) Changing the terms (for instance deciding it's not really 'unlimited' after all). You're talking about 1, and sure, there's not a lot you can do. As far as 2 and 3, back in the day, when you paid for a service you might sign a contract, and they could not simply decide to cancel your service in the middle of the contract because they didn't like you, for reasons not covered by the contract. Of course, that also assumes that they wouldn't just put "and by the way we can cancel your service at any time for any reason including just because we don't like you" in the contract, or that you would have some kind of negotiating power to demand different terms or go with a competitor with better terms. But obviously they _would_ just put that in the contract too, as they did in the ToS which is theoretically a contract too. And there's really another thing too specific to the Amazon terms posted above. They are advertising the service as 'unlimited', but then the terms say they can shut you off if your use "substantially exceeds or differs from normal use by other users." That doesn't really sound "unlimited" exactly, does it? I don't know if putting "Ha ha not really unlimited" in the ToS would protect them from such things as this: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/10/ftc-says-att-has-misled-millions-consumers-unlimited-data https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/10/ftc-s...
derefr 12y ago
I don't think they're going to enforce a "you went way over the storage other people tend to use" cap, the way ISPs tend to. S3 stores petabytes of stuff; they can eat your 50GB-per-day wastefulness without breaking a sweat. I think it's more to cover the case where you figure out a way to build a business that stores data in this, instead of in S3. Especially the case where that business is, itself, a primarily data storage or backup business, so you're directly living off the margin between "capital-cost storage for you" and "linear-revenue storage sold to customers." Amazon does not want to kill S3's business model, just yet.
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
How is that surprising? Do you seriously expect a company to commit to not only guarantee that their service will be supported forever but on top of that, that they guarantee they won't shut you down regardless of what you store on their servers?
chrramirez 12y ago
Why this quote is the highest ranking comment is beyond me...

by ivank 12y ago

untog 12y ago

Is this different to any other cloud storage provider?

ldonley 12y ago
No, this is pretty typical in terms and conditions for cloud storage providers.
- dayone 12y ago
  After foundation db leaving users in lurch, i'll be more careful while trusting other products.

j_s 12y ago

We also reserve the right to suspend or end the Services at any time at our discretion and without notice. https://www.dropbox.com/terms https://www.dropbox.com/terms

Dewie 12y ago
So I guess the conclusion is that no mainstream cloud service is to be relied on.
- hengheng 12y ago
  Well, these big services probably close down as often as an end user sees their hard drive fail.
  - belorn 12y ago
    This is not about a company closing down. Its about a company deciding to close their services for a user, arbitrarily, at their own discretion. Files you upload can be permanent deleted, at any time, at the whim of the service provider or any of their employees. You have no rights and no appeals.
  - Dewie 12y ago
    The difference is that a user doesn't feel like just using his computer normally gives him any backup. But if his folder is inside Dropbox, he might be lulled into a sense of comfort since he thinks of Dropbox as a kind of backup[1]. So if he uses Dropbox instead of just using his plain old computer (hard drive), then he might start to get more careless than when he didn't feel that he had a safety net. [1] Though personally I would disagree.
- dfinninger 12y ago
  https://owncloud.org/ https://owncloud.org/
  - sz4kerto 12y ago
    Can't your hosting provider terminate your contract?
    - vinceguidry 12y ago
      Use multiple services and replicate between them.
      - zkhalique 12y ago
        May as well use MaidSafe or Freenet

skizm 12y ago

"...if we determine that your use [...] substantially exceeds or differs from normal use by other users..." Why even bother putting "Unlimited" if they are just going to kick off the power users?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- Vexs 12y ago
  I think it's a reasonable thing to say on their part, it allows them to deal with weird cases, or errors that upload thousands of copies of the same file or something. It's just coverall-contracting.
  - izacus 12y ago
    And, don't forget, allows them to ban users who actually take them up on "Unlimited" clause and then cost them more as they pay.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Suspicion of what? Suspicion of actually taking them on their word when they advertise it as "unlimited"?
  - gfodor 12y ago
    warez edit: why downvotes? OP asked what person would be suspicious of, the answer (right or wrong) is piracy.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      My question was rhetorical. The problem is that their advertising is false - it is not unlimited when they put all kinds of restrictions on it. When their restrictions are unspecified it just makes matters worse, because it means I as a user has no recourse if they decide to shut down my account.

middleclick 12y ago

I have never come across a provider which doesn't have similar if not same ToS.

agildehaus 12y ago

They could also lose your files without notice due to some major technical glitch. Never rely 100% on anything.

louis-paul 12y ago
This new service probably leverages Amazon S3, which is designed to sustain 99.999999999% durability over a given year. That means it is not supposed to lose more than one file among 100,000,000 in a thousand years. That's pretty reliable.

JohnTHaller 12y ago

All the major cloud providers include clauses like this. Service is at their discretion. There is no uptime agreement. No guarantee your files will be there an hour from now. NEVER keep important things only on a cloud service with no backups and no guarantee of service.

newobj 12y ago

"I reserve the right to just crash and lose all your stuff." -- Your hard drive "Me too." -- Your backup hard drive "I also reserve the right to be stolen, dropped, burned up in a fire, or thrown out by your partner during a cleaning jag." -- Your hard drives in general

ploxiln 12y ago
"We sold you unlimited. But if you go over the secret threshold, we'll delete your account." -- Amazon This is why I hate "unlimited" in general. It's not unlimited, just tell me what the damn limit is.
- danudey 12y ago
  The key to 'unlimited' services is that the rate at which most users accrue stored data is slower than the rate at which storage becomes cheaper. That is to say, in the time it takes for your data to go from 1 GB to 10 GB, their cost-per-GB has gone down by >90%.
- rsync 12y ago
  Unlimited services put the user in an antagonistic relationship with the provider: http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-storage-services-vs-rsyncnet.html http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stora...

_pmf_ 12y ago

The chances of one of the hip companies going out of business is much, much higher for the average user than the chances of Amazon terminating their service. Amazon is not Google; I wouldn't put anything on Drive, given their history of product cancellations.

kbenson 12y ago
I'm not sure it's quite that simple. A smaller company doing this may go out of business, but Amazon may decide to stop for any number of simpler reasons, including but not limited to: - Deciding that this isn't a lucrative service - Deciding that it's had the desired effect on competition and served it's purpose - Releasing another service that they decide competes with this but is better
pgodzin 12y ago
None of the cancellations have been of core services, which Drive definitely is.
- _pmf_ 12y ago
  > None of the cancellations have been of core services, which Drive definitely is. What prevents them from redefining a core service to a non-core service on the go?
  - pgodzin 12y ago
    The amount of users. All the shutdowns, like Reader, have been very niche markets with orders of magnitude fewer users that Drive
msabalau 12y ago
Given that Amazon managed to "disappear" Orwell e-books that people bought from Amazon, before backpedaling, in the face of outrage and the overwhelming irony, I'm not certain I'd view them as an exemplary actor. Regardless, bunches of people offering free storage allows for a pleasing redundancy.

atmosx 12y ago

I think the best practice is to use the following backup scheme: - 1st line: your computer's HD. - 2nd line: your SOHO NAS (very cheap these days, I have a 2 + 2 (mirror) TB NAS) - 3rd line: remote backup The sensitive info should be encrypted at your computer, possibly with an encryption software that is easy to use everywhere (e.g. GPG). I can't think of any real-life scenario where these 3 copies get destroyed simultaneously. Now the real problem here is upstream. In 3rd world countries like mine (Greece), we have an avg upstream of less than 100 kb/s. So if my pictures/video/pc/whatever backup is > 50 GB, uploading it anywhere is a pain.

CPLX 12y ago
Not to totally derail this thread, but what do you recommend for SOHO NAS brands and models for this type of use case?
- atmosx 12y ago
  Anything that supports RAID1 would do for me. I had a ReadyNAS in the past but now I have a cheap 2-bay D-Link[1] with 2 + 2 TB of Western Digital HDs installed. The important thing is the PSU which should support both power supply AND ethernet[2]. This setup is for just family pictures, documents and some family video that is all backed up via TimeMachine. My code is on bitbucket/github. Some work documents are on Google drive too. ReadyNAS are way better especially the ones with INTEL cpus, since they can transcode video on the fly for some media players that require such a thing (e.g. you could stream video to your iPhone/iPad). But these are expensive and I don't need this kind of functionality. If I had more than 5-10 TB of data to backup then I'd for a custom tower, 8 GB of memory, Gbit Ethernet of course and + FreeNAS (ZFS + FreeBSD network stack). [1] http://amzn.to/1CSugSb http://amzn.to/1CSugSb [2] The ReadyNAS got toasted through ethernet by a thunder!!! [3] http://www.freenas.org http://www.freenas.org

ideonexus 12y ago

Amazon may actually be fair and enforce this legitimately, but I was once burned badly by the promise of "Unlimited Storage." Bluehost offered this, always with an asterisk*, and I assumed it was legitimate. So I tried to upload 20 gigs of home videos and family photos to share with my relatives. Next thing I know, all of my sites are 404ing, and when I call Bluehost, the tech tells me they shut down my hosting service because I was "abusing their unlimited storage." Then they pointed me to the asterisk that says unlimited storage isn't really unlimited and is whatever they feel like it should be on a case-by-case basis. Then I had to sit there on the phone with them and delete all my recently uploaded files before they would put my websites back online. caveat emptor

crazy1van 12y ago
Had this happen to me in the 90's with a dial up internet provider. The ISP said it was unlimited usage. So we had a second phone line in our house online a big chunk of the day. Eventually we got a bill with a very large "dedicated line fee" because we were dialed in too much. After enough complaining they removed the charge, but it was a good lesson that "unlimited" services backed by a finite resource are never truly unlimited.

jrochkind1 12y ago

Dropbox ToS: "We also reserve the right to suspend or end the Services at any time at our discretion and without notice. " https://www.dropbox.com/terms https://www.dropbox.com/terms And Google's: > We are constantly changing and improving our Services. We may add or remove functionalities or features, and we may suspend or stop a Service altogether... Google may also stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits to our Services at any time. http://www.google.com/policies/terms/ http://www.google.com/policies/terms/ (that's where a link to Terms of Service from Google Drive page at takes https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2450387?hl=en https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2450387?hl=en you, those general Google ToS) For better or for worse, nearly every ToS you will see anywhere includes a provision like this.

oaktowner 12y ago
Of course. Because what is the alternative? "We guarantee that we will operate this service for the next 1000 years, regardless of global warming, pestilence, famine and war?" Nothing lives forever. No company lives forever. Amazon, Microsoft, Google...may all go away some day. And, of course, they may change their business focus and decide to go a different way. I would expect any of them to provide notice and let people get their data out...but one should always assume that a service will go away at some point.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  Yeah, there's really two things here. 1) Shutting down the service entirely; 2) shutting off _your_ account in particular. Or really, also 3) Changing the terms (for instance deciding it's not really 'unlimited' after all). You're talking about 1, and sure, there's not a lot you can do. As far as 2 and 3, back in the day, when you paid for a service you might sign a contract, and they could not simply decide to cancel your service in the middle of the contract because they didn't like you, for reasons not covered by the contract. Of course, that also assumes that they wouldn't just put "and by the way we can cancel your service at any time for any reason including just because we don't like you" in the contract, or that you would have some kind of negotiating power to demand different terms or go with a competitor with better terms. But obviously they _would_ just put that in the contract too, as they did in the ToS which is theoretically a contract too. And there's really another thing too specific to the Amazon terms posted above. They are advertising the service as 'unlimited', but then the terms say they can shut you off if your use "substantially exceeds or differs from normal use by other users." That doesn't really sound "unlimited" exactly, does it? I don't know if putting "Ha ha not really unlimited" in the ToS would protect them from such things as this: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/10/ftc-says-att-has-misled-millions-consumers-unlimited-data https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/10/ftc-s...

derefr 12y ago

I don't think they're going to enforce a "you went way over the storage other people tend to use" cap, the way ISPs tend to. S3 stores petabytes of stuff; they can eat your 50GB-per-day wastefulness without breaking a sweat. I think it's more to cover the case where you figure out a way to build a business that stores data in this, instead of in S3. Especially the case where that business is, itself, a primarily data storage or backup business, so you're directly living off the margin between "capital-cost storage for you" and "linear-revenue storage sold to customers." Amazon does not want to kill S3's business model, just yet.

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

How is that surprising? Do you seriously expect a company to commit to not only guarantee that their service will be supported forever but on top of that, that they guarantee they won't shut you down regardless of what you store on their servers?

chrramirez 12y ago

Why this quote is the highest ranking comment is beyond me...