If you go for "Unlimited" it has to be really unlimited, otherwise you're lying.
"Unlimited" service if honestly sold and serviced, would mean that this number does not exist. You could keep throwing data at them and they could keep storing it.
What is that number? Is it low? Is it high? Only Amazon knows, but in the meantime, they're pretending that this number does not exist.
False. Advertising.
Me uploading my >1TB music/video collection for backup purposes that will only ever be touched by me? I honestly don't know, and knowing the way accounts are integrated, I'd rather not find out the hard way.
Logically, the acceptable amount they "want" you to store is obviously north of 5GB, since you get that for free by being a Prime member and you're paying for an upgrade, but I want to know where the line is, instead of playing this "it doesn't exist (but actually does and you're dead if you cross it)" charade.
It's much like companies having "unlimited vacation", where the net effect is that nobody takes any due to uncertainty.
The real problem is these companies want to eat their cake and have it too. They want to be able to advertise as unlimited, but not actually provide unlimited.
Now it's "your files, documents, etc." That's still a limitation by kind—the emphasis is on the "your." You can store as much data that you honestly, personally created for your own personal use, as you like.
Random terabyte-sized binaries? Not your personal data. Someone else's files? Not your personal data. Automated logs? Not your personal data.
But if you manage to create a few petabytes of vacation images? Sure, go right ahead.
What if it's all encrypted? Actually, scratch that, if I'm putting any substantial data in a random cloud service, it's going to be encrypted, period. Amazon gets incompressible, non-dedupable random bytes and nothing else.
What this all boils down to is that your definition is arbitrary and illogical, and has no support from the documentation, either friendly or legal, which leaves us right where we started:
Nobody knows how much they can put on this service, and the word "unlimited" is still false advertising.
There is no technical measure.
Instead, there is a heuristic that makes them curious about the purpose to which you are putting all your data usage. They then have the right to ask you to show them what kind of stuff you're putting in the cloud drive, at which point they can apply the actual measure—a human, ontological, qualitative measure of the "color" of your bits.
This is how the legal system works; this is how contracts work. Their provisions don't have to be interpretable by a dumb algorithm; they can be AGI-complete to solve for. This is why the court system has both police (instructed in an simple-but-false-positive-generating heuristic), and judges and/or juries (who are expected to then apply the human-deliberation-requiring "true algorithm" to screen out the false positives.)
Picture a savings account that holds "unlimited money." Does this mean that it holds money derived from tax fraud? No. Does this mean that it holds money used to create a correspondent deposit account for a wire-transfer service? No. These facts are intuitively obvious. Why doesn't it do these things? Because an account that does these things ceases to be a savings account per se. In the former case, it becomes an illegal conspiracy if they knowingly continue to serve you. In the latter case, it becomes a business account requiring strict money-service auditing. In both cases, if the bank detects suspicious activity (i.e. pushing millions of dollars around every day in said account), they have every right to ask you to what purpose you're putting their service—and to take the service away if you refuse to answer.
"Show" them? As previously mentioned, I'm encrypting my content. The nature of the data I'm story is both none of their business (I'm paying for unlimited data storage, not unlimited data storage of certain file types after all, per their advertising) and anyways it exposes them to further legal liability by way of asking that question.
I'm not sure i follow, how is it not?
If you're saying that the word can be used, but you know in Amazon's case that there is a secret number, then they shouldn't use it.. that seems unfair. There will always be a number to unlimited, hopefully published. It's technically impossible for it to be unlimited.
I mean, let me reverse the situation, and ask what amount of data/m or data/lifetime (data == tb, pb, whatever) would fit the word - for you?
The definition of "enough data" is going to vary person to person. I saw this and my mind went immediately to backups, but that is not a trivial amount of data (terabytes+), and I am not prepared to risk my Amazon account over it.
That's the problem, here. By not knowing what the number is, you are unable to make correct decisions, and with the alternative being account termination, that is unacceptable. Amazon has constructed a situation in which it's unclear what exactly they're selling, but since we know in advance that there must be a limit, they are advertising falsely.
The moment they kick someone out for this, ToS or not, they will have a legitimate claim of action. And I will guarantee you the actual number is going to be smaller than you think.
I definitely agree there. Though, i think their ToS could solve this by stating it in the fine print - assuming of course they really wanted to market the "Unlimited" word.
I did have a thought though, it was be interesting if a service like this offered "true" unlimited storage. How? Well, you could limit the upload/download rate, and ensure that you are always willing to expand faster than each user can upload.
Would make for an interesting PR spin for Unlimited.. but with so many companies touting Unlimited, it clearly wouldn't be worth it. Just an interesting thought.
Ahah just thought that maybe Amazon Glacier is implemented this way, and that's why it takes hours to recover a file.
That is why those things end up in contracts.
Someone is going to attempt to upload a pb of photos to amazon, and amazon is saying unlimited, but for personal usage (threshold quite possibly judged on a case-by-case basis), but doesn't include free storage of pbs of pictures.
At the end of the day, users need to be somewhat reasonable about what they expect from a $60/year service.
IMO the term is still a useful marketing short-hand that has come to mean "more than can reasonably expected unless you are purposefully trying to break the system", though cellular data providers in particular have done their part to cloud the issue by having "unlimited" terms that are really ridiculously limited.
Based on my dealings with Amazon so far I have every reason to believe their "unlimited" will be, if anything, overly generous.
If they can change the definition of "literally" in the dictionary they can probably change "unlimited" too.
The problem is making the marketing claim that this is "unlimited" when it's not. Call it "almost unlimited" or something similar and you're fine.
But I get it. Marketing.
The first person who gets kicked off for this should file a false advertising suit. The marketing doesn't get to give you something which the ToS immediately takes away.
Maybe then these idiots (yes, idiots, because it takes an astounding lack of either morals or intelligence) will learn that lying to your customers is not okay.
Again - explain to me how Verizon can be successfully sued for "unlimited" data (with throttling) and how these companies cannot with "unlimited" data (with undisclosed caps).
Explain how the two cases are substantially different, please. Just because Verizon are generally bastards and the companies above are generally not does not make false advertising okay or legal.
Just curious, but you say "successfully sued." I assume you mean they were sued, went to trial, and lost. I've actually tried looking this up, but I can't find this case. I've never really paid much attention to that, so forgive me.
It was a settlement, rather than an outright adverse ruling, but the net effect was the same - someone had to tap them on the shoulder and tell them to cut it out, they did, and had to pay out for their trouble.
Yes it is.
^Conditions and Restrictions apply.
Verizon got smacked around for exactly this behavior a while ago (selling "unlimited" data, with throttling after some arbitrary cap). This is not substantially different.
If Amazon did something like that, they could call it "Practically Unlimited", go on about "you could store 10 thousand hours of high def video" or whatever so that normal users get the idea that it's plenty, and still give the actual limits to those who care.
Maybe the catch is that they want a limit that's high enough that practically nobody will hit it, but low enough that it isn't a net loss if someone does fill it up, otherwise their enemies could get a bunch of dummy accounts and fill them up. So they'd rather just maintain the right to preferential treatment.
A buffet doesn't have to limit anyone's consumption to keep them at reasonable levels. Just like you can have broadband service with unlimited traffic. But storage is relatively expensive and can have quadratic cost if it's being constantly filled. It's a risky place to do actual "unlimited", and pretend "unlimited" is scummy.
edit: why downvotes? OP asked what person would be suspicious of, the answer (right or wrong) is piracy.
Google Drive with 30 TB storage is priced at $300 per month. But then you have Google Drive for Work with unlimited storage and is priced at $10 per user per month. Meaning that you can get 30 users with unlimited storage for the same price. Why in hell would anyone pay that?
In an enterprise environment that I'm familiar with that has 100k users on a shared file store solution... Something like 10% of users use less that 1GB, the 99th percentile user uses 1TB, the 90th percentile users is something like 30GB.
Why even bother putting "Unlimited" if they are just going to kick off the power users?