What if you „lose“ your google / apple account, like this sanctioned judge of the international criminal court? Crazy to imagine that we are still baking in dependency on US providers in european societies, even though there is clear indications we should be doing the opposite?

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debazel 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You wouldn't even have to be a high profile target like a sanctioned judge. Simply getting your account banned by some automated process that marked you as "suspicious" will basically render you excluded from society.

It is absolutely insane to put this amount of power in 2 foreign companies that will be able to destroy your life with zero reason, oversight, or due process.

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kouteiheika 7 hours ago | parent [-]

This is not a hypothetical problem and you don't need to be deliberately targeted. It actually happens to normal people. And if it does you have absolutely zero recourse.

Source: I have a banned Google account (it's over 20 years old at this point). I know the password, but Google doesn't let me log into it. Every few years I try to unsuccessfully recover it.

If you have a Google account and having it banned would be a problem for you here's my advice: migrate. Right now. You never know when one of their bots will deem you a persona non grata.

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stephbook 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Can't you just create a new account?

	▲	kouteiheika 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can, but you lose access to anything that was associated with your old account. Another fun thing Google did is to automatically (without my consent) add a required second-factor authentication to my current Google account. I have this old, e-waste tier phone that I use mostly only as a glorified alarm clock, and at one point I used it to log into my current Google account. Imagine my surprise when I tried to log in to my Google account from somewhere else, and it asked me for an authentication code from this phone. Again, I have never explicitly set it up as such - Google did this automatically! So if I were to lose this phone I'd be screwed yet again, with yet another inaccessible Google account that I will have no way of recovering. At this point I don't depend on any Big Tech services; my Google account has nothing of value associated with it (only my YouTube subscription list, which is easy enough to backup and restore), and I pay for my own email on my own domain, etc. So if I get screwed over yet again by a big, soulless corporation that just sees me as a number on their bottom-line, well, I just won't care.

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Animats 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Then you can't take a Waymo any more.

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hulitu 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Crazy to imagine that we are still baking in dependency on US providers in european societies

As long as the capital city is in Washington, this is normal.

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jakoblorz 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Not sure I‘m getting what you are saying - us providers‘ capital city is always in Washington DC, no?

Sorry if I’m misunderstanding something here

	▲	201984 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		He's saying the EU's capital city is Washington.

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_3u10 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	aparadja 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This tone is not very suitable for HN. I’m sure you could start a better discussion if you gave it a proper try.