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Re:Amazon Goes After Dropbox, Google, Microsoft with Unlimit... by Karunamon on Thursday March 26, 2015 @04:54PM (#9273037)
My fully legal music collection curated over the past decade or so? Absolutely my personal data. Backups of my home server that run, among other things, personal websites, source code repos, and a home automation system? Absolutely my personal data. How about paperwork from the doctor's office? I'd like to see you argue that isn't "my personal data" despite not being created by me.

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.

Re:Amazon Goes After Dropbox, Google, Microsoft with Unlimit... by derefr on Friday March 27, 2015 @01:21AM (#9274876)
You're imagining that there is a limit imposed by a technical measure that can detect accounts that are, by strict definition, breaking the terms of the agreement. And since they are not telling you the limit encoded by this technical measure, the service is not unlimited.

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.

Re:Amazon Goes After Dropbox, Google, Microsoft with Unlimit... by Karunamon on Friday March 27, 2015 @04:31PM (#9278793)
They then have the right to ask you to show them what kind of stuff you're putting in the cloud drive

"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.