Corporations play the role of gods in our society.

edit: about the same role as Greek or Roman gods.

Because their TC is $400,000 and they need it to justify their Bay Area mortgage. Come on, folks, follow the money.

Crazy how the industry with the biggest margins has the worst contempt for their customers

The root issue/risk is from cascading service dependencies, and I'm 99% sure this is done unintentionally at Apple et al.

Team builds service. Service depends on first party identity/authentication because it's easier.

... Fast forward 20 years, and no one at platform company even understands the dependency graph from a customer perspective anymore. Especially in the case of rare events like account locks.

Consequently, those customers face a sudden Kafkaesque maze of edge cases that don't line up, as the customer service processes people are funneled through are literally incapable of solving the problem.

Which means the entire "normal" customer support apparatus is unavailable to them. (The same apparatus companies aggressive shove all support through)

This is why there should be regulatory requirements for identity platforms mandating the ability to speak to a human who's empowered to fix your issue + an option for customer-choice decision arbitration + continuous random sample audits with penalties for falling below KPIs (timeliness, correctness, etc).

It should literally be illegal for a company to have their banning system 'oops' and then pretend they don't know you.

Because it's only going to get worse as more AI / probably correct methods infuse account security functions.

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You’re right that nearly all responses are emotional , to maintain internal consistency. Even purchasing large gift cards is a common discounting approach when paying for cloud .

The sad news is when important people get locked out they can call dedicated support . This case was of someone who wasn’t celebrity enough to have that access

Oh I doubt it was his fault. I had something similar happen setting up a phone for a neighbor. Apple decided it was fraudulent after I added her address to the account. It was now dead with no recourse. At least I didn’t spend much on a used phone. Picked up an android and said it’s time to adapt.

I love your comment and I could not just upvote it because it is true with so many things. The technocracy/corpocracy is trying to sell you things that mnake you believe you can have power over everything, even your life. Anyone who "fails" at anything, it is all your fault. I have literally been told my mental illness, and my current homelessness, is my fault because I did not do the right thing. The power and control people think they have over their lives is a paper thin delusion.

Our shared powerlessness should bring us in communion with others, but the technocracy/corpocracy wants to rip that apart and make us dependent on them for profit.

Surprised at the downvotes to your excellent comment.

Good insight - that people dunk on the author as a cope to help the dunker feel less powerless

you're right there's a fine line. I interpreted the tone of most as judgmental / critical.

saying "get a lawyer" or "file a complaint" is constructive. saying " it's your fault for not backing up" or "that's what you get by using cloud" is just judgmental. Neither are practical solutions, regardless. Even with perfect backups it would have happened. And for 99% of social people, it's impossible not to cloud.

Using a separate email address for each site is smart, but creating a separate email account for each site is going to be very tedious, and I imagine Google, Yahoo, etc are going to stop you very quickly after you've opened 20+ accounts with the same phone number.

(Use a catch-all to have different email addresses for different sites, because when one gets hacked, then the damage is limited.)

I don't have anything serious on Google drive, just some files I share with third parties that primarily exist on my network; and certainly no photos. Photos are on my NAS which is backed up on several disks; I publish them on a small app that I built, self-hosted (after years with Smugmug I left them two years ago).

Most accounts with third parties use domains I own that are not on Google in any way. Some still use a gmail address and I need to migrate those. But nothing essential.

It means people that don’t use cloud at all can’t possibly work with anyone else

It's a joke.

You can run rclone every couple minutes on your NAS, it checks mtimes like rsync so it is reasonably efficient for most cases, though you may run into ratelimits with bigger data.

Google Photos deliberately broke all backup tools in March, so there's that.

Yes you can still mostly do Takeout, but it's garbage. (not incremental. Requires me to remember. duplicates files for every album (total incompetence). downloads regularly fail. Requires more room than I have on my mac to decompress so I have to put it on an external drive.)

> How do you collaborate ?

I commit code. I pair program. I share screen. That sort of thing. Code is mostly set up to have reproducible results. If it is not working on the other machine, then that's a bug and we need to solve it. There is not much collaboration I need to be doing in my free time. What I did on the last job is not what I depend on, but what a business thought they depend on. That's their stuff. If it fails because of some cloud ban or outage, not my problem.

When I need to share files with friends, I send them the files. Or I use Copyparty. Or, if they are more technically minded, I use Syncthing. For not so technical friends, I don't have to share 10k photos at once. Maybe I will send them a few photos via a messenger. Or some files they need via a messenger or have them on Copyparty, if needed often or again in the future. There is no issue.

> Do you have friends ?

Yes.

> A job ?

Had, and probably soon will have again, but I don't know what that has to do with what I depend on. If my job prescribes some cloud usage that is unnecessary, I guess I can try and show an alternative and begrudgingly accept that I have to use shitty tooling. But if somehow it is made impossible for me to use that, then it is their job to find an alternative. I am never the one prescribing it, and I myself don't depend on cloud.

> I’m not being rhetorical —- it’s very rare to have friends or a job and not have some ties to the cloud. Even my tiny HOA manages its record in the cloud

I surely have friends, who probably use some MS or Google cloud stuff. But that's their problem, not mine. I don't depend on that. And they don't share that much stuff with me, that there is sufficient incentive to start depending on it. And if they did, I would tell them, that I don't want to make a shitty account on MS or Google cloud storage thingies.

The main side-effect is the lack of trust and integration. For example, if you self-host your email (or more realistically push it on a VPS), then the moment you want to send an e-mail you are going to be marked as spam.

To register on some websites you may sometimes receive: “please use real email from gmail/outlook/etc”.

When you have a business meeting with a customer: “oh just install Jitsi on your mobile phone” is the best way to lose a sale.

Or no way to pay train tickets because you cannot install the app because your Apple / Play Store account is locked.

> there's no market for selling a solution that gives individuals data sovereignty

Theres no turnkey solution (of course not, it is prohibitively complex to architect one), but the bits and pieces are there, built on tried and tested software. For example, SMB and rsync and their clients, are practically enough to do backups.

Sovereignty also means responsibility. Either you have to keep your network secure, or you pay someone else do it (not always very well), otherwise you get security problems. Same goes for redundants backups, hardware maintenance, etc.

And yet all it takes is buying a piece of hardware and installing an app, something that plenty of "normal" people do every day.

First of all, you don't have to care about this, unless you are wanting something from others and you depend on others and their opinion about your writing significantly.

That said, it does make your writing seem very odd. A little bit like the people, who apparently don't know what the shift key does, or how to trigger capital letters on their phones or something, and write only in lowercase letters.

Just because your phone does something silly, and it is not you doing it intentionally, that doesn't mean, that other people will not get a weird impression from you writing like that. In a way, you are letting your phone change the impression others are getting from your writing. And that impression is for many people that they wonder, whether you know the conventions of writing.

Now, like I said, you don't have to care about this. But if you want your texts to not come across like teenager written texts or low effort texts, it would be a good idea to fix your phone's silly settings, so that it doesn't do that to your writing.

For what it’s worth, I remember having this issue with Samsung OneUI keyboard when it was in French. In French there is this rule there that you should put a space before “?” and “!”, so perhaps their developers understood “all punctuation” or something.

I wonder what is his case.

Didn't they boot him for a ToS violation?

> Any lawyer can file a complaint in small claims .

No, in many states _no_ lawyer can file a complaint (except his own) in small claims court.

> If they were banned from Microsoft 365 they would instantly go out of business.

Seeing how Microsoft is doing, they’re going to learn this lesson sooner or later.

> I don't think the idea that they could lose access to their accounts occurs to most people

Most people do not store anything valuable in the cloud anyway. The only problem is that they won't be able to login into Windows if MS bans the account, and they won't be able to install apps if Google bans their account along with phone serial number.

> I don't think the idea that they could lose access to their accounts occurs to most people.

"It just works" was practically a mantra for Steve Jobs, now we turn around and blame users for thinking that it will work