Contrary to what the title might seem to imply, I don’t want to open a debate about potential privacy or security issues with Gmail (or Google at large).
I’m actually curious, given the feelings of many here about fractional reserve banking, what everyone thinks about Gmail’s storage. I have a pretty strong hunch that Google does not actually have the 7.2 gigabytes of space, and counting, to back up each account registered with them. Given that they don’t state this anywhere explicitly (although, to be fair, how many people are actually going to hit that limit?), is it ethical for them to be offering it like they have it?
It’s pretty tricky. Does Google claim to actually have the physical storage available? Or is its responsibility to the account holder to provide the space when it is called for into use?
Well, let’s simplify the situation a little. Gmail isn’t actually selling or renting anything to you (even for free), so you have no contractual claim on the drive space controlled by Gmail. But let’s think of a company that is renting drive space and, let’s say, they find that most disk renters use only 50% of their available drive space. To make up for this slack and offer lower prices (and earn higher profit), the data storage company starts renting more disk space than it actually has. I’m unclear on whether this would actually be fraud because it doesn’t involve fraudulent transfer of property titles.
Consider that instead of disk space we are talking about warehouse floor space. A warehouse rents out its floor space and finds that as much as 50% is unused at any given time… so, to make up for it, they start renting more floor space than the size of the warehouse. Is this, in fact, fraudulent? I don’t know. Airlines also sell more seats than the airplane has, because a certain percentage of passengers, on average, cancel their tickets at the last minute. I don’t know if this is fraudulent or not because I’m not clear on the difference between selling property versus renting property in terms of how that works out with respect to the number of property titles.
That is the coolest question I’ve seen in a while. Well done.
Now, as with anything, this would depend on the arbiters/Liability insurers judgment. But please, keep in mind that in the real world:
even if found guilty, Gmail will have to indemnify you of…nothing, because that’s what you’ve paid. Google gives us a mere promise, not a contract, and it can default on it whenever it chooses to. As for when you actually pay something…
Does it matter to you? Does it really matter whether Google actually has the space it promises, or whether the warehouse has the space it promises? What bout the aircraft, or the Bank? To most people it will matter ONLY if they actually hit t the “ceiling” an it is below what they’re been promised. Than, I believe it would be clear that this would be considered fraud by most. Else, I really doubt that many cases would be brought before arbiters. If there’s no economic consequence almost no one will waste his time to read the contract (do YOU read Terms of Use?)
So, the “sticky case” has no practical importance.
Are we talking about specific parcels in a warehouse? For example specific 20x20 metres? Then it is fraud big time. Renting space in this manner is renting the ability to at any time be able to use the specific space rented.
I would say it is not fraud until it actually happens that somebody is left without a seat. And then it is only fraud against him, but not against the other passengers. (This assuming the tickets don’t come with seat numbers on them.)
Time? What if Google said, “if you perform the action of registration, thenwe will allocate to your 2GB of space for your emails”? Is that a valid contract?
To everyone: I’m quite aware that Gmail is provided free-of-charge, and I myself use it extensively. I didn’t mean it to seem like a complaint against them; rather, I just think it’s a curious thought exercise.
The interesting aspect of it, though, is that if enough people manage to use up the alloted space, presumably everyone else (or, at least, everyone whose data is stored on the same server) would then have a hard limit on their data too, until Google realizes what’s going on and does something to alleviate the situation.
Sure, I can agree with that… allocated warehouse floor space cannot be double-rented. But if I’m selling “20 square meters of storage space within warehouse A” then all I need is to have 20 square meters available somewhere within the warehouse. Not sure if that’s fraud. Though I’m sure customers would buy 20 square meters of allocated space over 20 square meters “somewhere” in a warehouse, for the same price.
What is renting? Is it a sub-title? To what does the renter have claim? If I rent a warehouse and you (the owner) subsequently lock the doors, where is the aggression?
This is a common practice among ISPs who sell more bandwidth to each customer than they actually have, because statistically, only a small percentage of the total bandwidth available is being used at one time. So if all customers tried to use their maximum bandwidth at once, none of them would get full bandwidth, however that’s a highly unlikely scenario.
So I’m guessing Gmail does the same thing. Only a very small percentage of users fully utilize the available storage space.