SILICON VALLEY — Your 50GB of cloud storage now includes 300GB of files you deleted three years ago. That’s right: your tech company is charging you for digital ghosts, according to a new billing transparency report from the Cloud Storage Transparency Coalition.
“We’re seeing a new phenomenon where customers expect their deleted photos to just… vanish,” said Marcus Henderson, a spokesperson for MegaStorage Inc., the world’s largest cloud provider. “But what they don’t realize is that their hard drive still has a relationship with those files, and that relationship is a recurring monthly expense.”
SAN FRANCISCO — If you’ve ever paused to consider what might happen when billions of photos, videos, and memes are stored in the sky, you should not be surprised by the latest revelation from the United States Digital Archive Commission (USDAC). Beginning at 8:14 AM Pacific Time last Tuesday, Google Cloud announced it will no longer accept new uploads until all existing content files have signed their own “Emotional Content Discharge Agreements.”
The first time a child learned to say “thank you,” someone should have charged interest. That is the opening line of a new legal framework emerging from the Silicon Valley courts, where a mother from Sacramento is suing an AI model company for the unauthorized commercial use of her daughter’s first birthday party footage.
“Your child is the first data point in my dataset,” reads the complaint filed in San Francisco Federal Court. “And she is also now a profitable asset for a company that doesn’t even know she exists.”