Because he stopped paying for the service of unlimited storage for this month (as that service was no longer offered), didn't migrate the data to somebody offering a better deal, and expected for it to be retained indefinitely?
I think you need context. Google stopped offering unlimted storage, the journalists was raided by the FBI some 7 months ago, and during that legal dispute he was occupied until Google gave a 7 day ultimatim.
He already did have data backed up, and it was seized by the government because Fox News or Kayne West really didn't want that news page (live on a URL already) "leaked" or whatever.
>didn't migrate the data to somebody offering a better deal
Why would this be considered? What if he didn't want to migrate 200+ TB of data and just decided to stay where he's at, continuing to pay Google a lot of money?
> Why would this be considered? What if he didn't want to migrate 200+ TB of data and just decided to stay where he's at, continuing to pay Google a lot of money?
Because whatever he was paying Google wasn't enough, so they removed the "unlimited storage for $12/month or officially $60/month" offering.
There was another option - pay for enough Business Plus seats to reach the pooled storage requirement. At 240tb that means he needs 48 seats, and at $18/month that's $864/month. Not bad for cloud storage geo-replicated on at least 2 continents at any time.
As per the article, he hasn't been paying for the service for like six months.
And he was never paying "a lot of money" for this. He was paying like 1% the going rate, and for every month that he paid that he did get the promised unlimited storage.
And in this case, that amount is an order of magnitude lower that what the service cost to provide.
It seems odd that after underpaying by a lot for a long time, that the user would complain that they were given 2 months of free service and then 5 more months of read-only access to get their stuff off. Sure, Google should have communicated more clearly but Burke's expectations here are also entirely unreasonable.
The real villain of this story is the FBI and how computer seizures are handled. The FBI still hasn't charged Tim Burke with anything and are holding his MFA devices hostage trying to get him to unlock his phone for them.
I think the point is Google could have communicated more clearly, and we shouldn't understate that. You don't give a business (since this was an enterprise account) a week to take action. That's unacceptable. A large business may need a week just to get the paperwork ready for the employee to start the migration.
This is a common problem and it has screwed over many other people. we can't just leave livlihoods to the whimsy of automated bots without some human to contact.
> I think the point is Google could have communicated more clearly
Agreed. It's always better to make things as clear as possible for the slow and deliberately obtuse. However, that doesn't excuse the user here from having completely unreasonable expectations.
> You don't give a business (since this was an enterprise account) a week to take action. That's unacceptable.
They were given over half a year and did nothing.
> we can't just leave livlihoods to the whimsy of automated bots without some human to contact.
I agree and support a law that creates a standardized dispute/appeal process for customers of large companies. I don't think that would have directly helped in this case as no such system should force a company to continue offer a product at a loss or offer more than 6 months of migration time. Perhaps the threat of appeals through such a system would have incentivized clearer communication though
