It just allows them the ability to kick off abusers. Someone is going to write a script to endlessly upload nonsense data to Amazon just because they can.
By that logic, nothing can be unlimited. There are a finite number of computers, hard drives, heck even atoms in the world and therefore no company could offer an unlimited amount of storage.
That logic is not what we're measuring against. The logic we're measuring against is the existence of a number, which represents some amount of data stored which, when reached, will result in the termination of your account.
"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.
What makes you think the number exists and this isn't just a standard "don't be an asshole" clause to protect Amazon from someone who abuses the system?
Here's the thing - when you throw around words like "unlimited", "abuse" gets really hard to define. Some guy hosting his warez collection for all his scene friends? Obviously abuse.
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.
How does my taking a company's advertising at its word and treating the unlimited service they provide as unlimited make me an asshole?
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.
Before, it was "unlimited photos." That makes sense: they'd remove anything that's not a photo. It's limited by kind, not by size.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
When I hear "unlimited", I think of "enough data that you will never have to worry about hitting a hard cap".
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.
> 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.
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.
I worked for a company that offered an unlimited X. A startup used us to host some of their X, and literally uploaded a thousand times more data than any other user.
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.
The main reason they don't want to do that is because their target market won't have any idea what X GB or Y TB means. Unlimited is their whole draw. I agree with the various sibling replies saying that it's not reasonable to expect them to allow truly unlimited storage. If you're storing petabytes, it's too much. But what they could easily do is simply include a clause in their TOS saying, "'Unlimited' in this context means up to 10TB" or whatever. Large enough that it would be effectively unlimited for any reasonable personal use, but still there's a cap to prevent true abuse. Much better than this, "There's actually a limit, but we won't tell you what it is," nonsense.
If we really want to be so pedantic then the term unlimited can never be used in this context due to the Bekenstein bound.
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.
