So yes, right now we've woken up in a world that is not so much cyberpunk as it is techno-feudalism: more and more do you need a presence on the Internet to do things in meatspace... And that presence is by the grace of several feudal lords (Google foremost) - woe betide you should you ever displease them. You do not really own your email adres, your phone (number) or (pretty soon) even your computer. You're merely a serf.

On the plus side, the momentum for legal measurements seems to be increasing. Let's hope they do get broken up. Power, like plutonium, is dangerous if too concentrated. Regardless of where that concentration lies.

We need to treat companies that put themselves into a position like utilities as utilities. Give individuals actual transparency of why actions where taken, and an ability to appeal these decisions with transparency.

It will cost more, but that is ok. What we have now is that the actions have caused real harm and the companies are unwilling to justify them. That's an abuse that needs to be removed through law.

The hard slap they got from the government was enough to apparently permanently change the company culture around treatment of users and other businesses.

I see a lot of the excesses we see coming out of Google, Twitter, FB, to be a consequence of there being, well, zero consequences for their behavior. They're like petulant children who never learned limits and think it's ok to do whatever they want, no matter who they hurt. That's exactly how you teach children -- give them limits. Ironically, the same rule applies to adults.

In general, I think that's also a point we can draw from the cyberpunk genre, or maybe from Harry Harrison's old-school prefiguration of it in the Stainless Steel Rat series - the eponymous creature being one well suited to thrive "within the walls" of a society increasingly sclerotized with technocratic bureaucracy, but perhaps equally suited to a life of gnawing through the circumscriptions imposed by competing technofeudalist fiefdoms.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

I view my digital purchases as things I am forever renting.

Movies/Music/Books can be displayed and played back on damn near anything. Games, especially modern games, exist in both a variable state (constantly revised/updated), but also with a much more limited ability to access the content.

That experience forever turned me off to relying on digital-only.

To your points, having a PSN account is necessary but I can always create a new one if need be.

Whenever possible, I prioritize non-DRM media for purchase.

I don’t think they’re really interested in that, since the accounts are almost by definition making them a bunch of money.

So, not an Amazon account ban, but you quickly learn you are not "buying" a movie, but renting it, sometimes with silly restrictions like "only from these IPs".

If you think about it, this shouldn't be all that surprising - after all, this is exactly how intuition works, and the human mind runs very much on intuition, people just don't realize it (at the object level).

It’s still a concern because of the mechanics of the thing, but it appears less applicable for amazon at the moment.

Not that that's Nintendo's fault but I think something like this will be the fate of every account that's not used, closed or deleted for a long time and owning your data and software possessions would protect against it.

—

I run my own mail server but my VPS provider could be coerced to yank it from me. You’ve made me uncomfortable with revelations. Damn, we’re fucked.

[] Every person's thinking and writing is mostly just a pastiche stitched together of thoughts they heard or read from others anyway. (And this is, of course, the meme idea, which is not an original idea itself either)

I've got two comments on this.

Firstly, you're already doing much better than most people. Make frequent backups, and if it comes down to it, you can always point DNS at a new provider.

Second, don't put anything on a VPS that you aren't willing to let the VPS provider or whatever Gov. has jurisdiction access. Where email falls on that spectrum for you is of course your own decision.

But in every society a small circle of privileged people have always been the norm and despite more wider access to information today it seems like consolidation of power and wealth seems to be trending upward.

But even a little plutonium is too dangerous to let my kid play with it.

Email? Not quite as much.

The answer is actually very simple: spam.

AFAIK pretty much all disabled Google accounts come from Google believing they are part of a spam-sending (or malware-spreading) network.

The ability to sign up for free Google accounts means this is a prime target for spammers to use and abuse -- signing up for free Gmail/Drive accounts, as well as using stolen credit cars to sign up for paid ones.

As to why the legal system doesn't want to be involved, it's because incorrectly disabled Google accounts are actually incredibly rare -- they make the news and cause uproar when they occur, but precisely because it's so unusual -- it's incredibly rare to personally know someone it happened to. So there isn't any kind of democratic movement against it because in the grand scheme of things it isn't common. It's like worrying about being struck by lightning.

That's why.

I don't know anyone who has a degree in History but that doesn't mean historians are especially unusual. All it means is that my network is quite small.

The same is true here. The fact few people know someone who has been affected by this problem doesn't mean the problem is unusual. It just means there are hundreds of millions of people who use Google and you know a few thousand at most.

So... incredibly rare, really.

The extremely large majority of people go on to work regular jobs that have nothing to do with their degree and lose much of the information they learned, if it was even substantial at all.

Or they rarely make the news because they're so common, and the few that get publicised are because the victim raises a big stink on social media.

I've certainly created Twitter and Microsoft accounts and had them wrongly disabled within days, despite not doing anything at all with them, let alone anything abusive. Perhaps because I decline to use my cell phone number for 2FA?

That's because that's also a common tactic used by spammers -- to register and then do nothing for days/months, on the hopes that an "older" account will be less suspicious.

Nobody's complaining about that though because it's not a problem. No data is lost. Also, I've had it happen to myself (with Twitter) and it was incredibly easy to re-instate.

To clarify, I was referring to legitimate, in-use (with data to lose) accounts being incorrectly disabled.

The ones that make the news are people that are either well known, or have and active way to promote their problems through social media or news site

I.e they are reporters, know a reporter, dev of a popular app, etc etc etc

They are Jane/John Doe that has less than 50 twitter followers and a normal every day uninteresting person, for which there is no recourse at all not even social media

https://transparencyreport.google.com/

If lightning strikes there is not much to be done. Google however can and must have reasonable process to restore the status.

I'd suggest its because its hard to prove or prosecute. Because its technical and obscure. A single case, Google just has to say "Oh sorry; its turned back on". There's no money in them capitulating. And a class-action suit enters into the details of the issue, which are impenetrable to a judge?

That approach: “proof of human work.” Google owns ReCAPTCHA, and every time you do a ReCAPTCHA for Google, you’re doing a little one-time proof-of-humanity for them. But it’s also a proof-of-work; and proofs-of-work that cannot be automated are aggregatable.

In other words, the fact that someone with Google account X solved a ReCAPTCHA, doesn’t just tell you something about who that account is lately. It should add to a sort of “human-proof credit score” for the account, where Google’s systems are more willing to put faith in the user because of all the times they’ve proven themselves human already.

And, for some scenarios, Google does use the aggregate proof ReCAPTCHA represents this way. This is why you’ll never see the Google Search “stop searching so fast” message when accessing Search through Chrome synced to a well-used Google account; why you’ll get a ReCAPTCHA portal from them instead if you’re not logged in (you’re being asked to build the credit score of your IP/session); and why you’ll be denied upfront if you perform botlike behavior through Tor (where there’s nothing that can be correlated to give you a persistent credit score.)

Now, such a “highly-proven” Google account could still be heuristically detected elsewhere in Google’s systems as being responsible for botlike behavior (e.g. spamming); but, when such a highly-proven account is flagged, it should go in for manual review. Because — as you say — this is incredibly rare! So this process doesn’t need to scale through automation, the way regular Google processes do. It can be high-touch.

But right now, it’s not. (Or they’re just not even using the high-proof-of-humanity metadata on the account during this determination.) Either way, that’s kind of silly.

When I got started programming full time, tons of people in the software industry were getting their rocks off on how simple it is to install an Oauth library, making it easy as pie for people to sign in to a web service, thus encouraging more sign ups and making more money.

Maybe we've forgotten just how much of a hard-on we and the entire world once had for the likes of Google. 8 years ago, we would have trusted Google with our entire future. Politicians were on board, too, and have made many deals with Silicon Valley which ended up giving these firms a certain level of immunity.

We're all guilty.

Never in my life did I see an Oauth libruary and think this is easy as pie. Overcomplicated perhaps.

Plus that email/account is hardly even "yours" in a serious way. Anyone on the HN has a very simple fix for all these problems: get an email in your domain and a password manager for all the accounts. There, solved. You could even still use Gmail with their Google Apps, G Suite, Workplace or whatever it's called this month.

Normies are way out of luck but sadly that is true almost everywhere and they are getting fleeced much worse by banks, employers, and even cable companies than Google ever could hope.

If someone owned a vast amount of land, more than needed for everyone on earth to build a house, and the owner told people they could freely build structures but you lose it if you break the rules and the rules can change any time...

On the technical side, one hears about individuals' domains being marked (blamelessly) as possible-spammers by the big e-mail services, and finding it hard to get messages through. There is effectively some scarcity in legible, desirable gmail addresses.

Maybe it has hurt me somehow but...I wouldn’t want to work somewhere that would hold my email domain against me

If you cant pay your rent because no customer can reach you anymore or loose trust in you (because you don't answer) your house is gone shorter than you think.

Seems like there's an opportunity there though. If someone could create a platform that would take your address, create you a custom domain, set it up, get your email flowing there (including porting over all your existing email out of gmail), and then helping you move your sign ins to that new address..

That'd be huge. It would also be very, very hard, the amount of infrastructure it would touch.. but doable.

It can.

it would likely cause an uproar,

It doesn’t.

it wouldn't be tolerated.

It is.

Big fat article in the New York Times some months ago about AI deciding that landlords shouldn’t rent to certain people, and the AI often being wrong. Very wrong. Like tagging someone as a convicted drug dealer, when the reality is that person has never been in trouble with the law, and never been to the state where the alleged offense supposedly happened.

We have to stop calling this “artificial intelligence,” because it simply is not intelligent. Humans put faith in machines because were told they are intelligent. But all the evidence shows that at best “AI” is good at guessing.

If we started calling these “artificial guessing” systems, people would treat them appropriately. But that doesn’t buy investors a boat.

Google fills the gap.

This political model is dated. Republicans are no longer conservative. And Democrats have an ascendant progressive wing that rejects corporate influence wholesale.

Who mostly organise and communicate on giant social media platforms, who they campaign to fact-check things. Not exactly wholesale rejection.

The real question is why do people use Google to sign in to other services? It never even crossed my mind no matter how long I have had a Google account.

It’s also trivial to have passwords which are secure and easy to remember (literally off the top of my head): MyD0gb@rk$...

... you have clearly not understood that you should not have trusted them in the first place.

Yes, I have a Google account myself, but I try to use it as little as possible. My main reason for using it is the Play Store and I agree that it is unjust, that Google can remove my access to products I have paid for without really justifying for it in the sense of most people.

So I agree that something should be done. I think the line should be where paid services are offered. So if you just use a free service, Google(or any Company) should be able to stop providing you with that service whenever they like (while still providing you with access to the data you have generated or used with the service).

However, as soon as they have charged you, they should be forced to pay you back the whole amount (or offer some other kind of mediation that is more meaningful than receiving answers like 'Computer says no').

If you are using a free e-mail service ran buy one the worlds largest and most powerful marketing companies as the identity / auth provider for your critical services and applications you should seriously reconsider your choice.

To paraphrase your comment: I'm honestly not sure where we went so wrong as a society so as to reach a point that we get mad when a service we do not pay for, ran by a selfish company decides to shutdown our access.

Edit: The point is that it is usually in companies own interest that we don't create laws restricting them, so they typically don't act too amoral. You wont find many companies which goes after every single legal loophole they can abuse, as negative public sentiment builds up laws will form and the company will be much worse off than if they just did the slightly less amoral thing.

The de facto monopoly of most of these players exists in their cross-border market share, making enforcement under traditional antitrust law in any one country difficult.

Unfortunately, it's also something of an international zero sum game due to efficiences of scale -- if the US breaks up Amazon, Alibaba gains world market share, and we're back in the same place.

The most effective remedy I can think of offhand is government involvement in a special, independent branch of the company, dedicated to increasing interoperability and exposing services, empowered by legislation.

If we're going to have monopolies, at least they can be open ones. E.g. 18F + Google Takeout, backed up by regulation

As with all things, Education is where we went wrong as a society.

in this case failing to teach people fully that there is no Free Lunch, and if you are getting something no cost to you, then you are no longer the customer, who ever is paying for the good or service is the customer (people should also pay attention to this truism in other area's of life)

In the case of google, you are the product, you are being sold to advertisers, google gives you a very very very small piece of that revenue in the form of a "free service"

The stakes are quite high for losing access to your primary email.

(Roughly. I am not a lawyer.)

Less likely here, given the somewhat unexplored territory, but still, the history of class-action litigation evolution is largely of lawyers/firms taking a chance such as this.

I think the overall point here is to have the support of law that says they DO have a duty to you, by benefit of their hosting your account and authenticating you elsewhere.

Then, WHEN someone goes to sue them, the person has much stronger legs in court rather than lone Peggy Sue trying to defeat Google's 300-strong team of lawyers who exist just to eat little guys for breakfast.

At every point, google users are asked to acknowledge the EULA and TOS. They're being told that google can stop their service for any reason, including that service not being comercially viable. ( I.E. Any Reason )

Access to google services isn't a right. It never was, unlike the property rights you're drawing a false equivalency with.

This pandemic has been reliant on emails to access services; it's how I get my payslips, talk to my employer, get current information, engage with legal services, and essentially maintain my access to society.

Losing my emails would be devastating (hence why I don't use a "major" provider, at least less risk that way).

We need to define what "rights" are and weigh that interest in society. If Google wants to be a "one stop shop" it cannot, and must not, be immune to laws and the rights of individuals to challenge decisions.

Isn't that the foundation of a society?

I have a google account to test my devices / emulators. Never logged in gmail with that account, never will. If they cut it off, I can make another.

Same with Apple. I have an Apple free ID for running virtual machines with MacOS / iOS and that's all. I tell my customers to create their own Apple ID and I deliver them the sources + dev environment and they make their own binaries and publish on Apple store. My job is done once I make the app run on emulators and I tell them from the start of the project this.

I have a FB account to talk on FB mess with parents from school and that's all. I don't even have them as friends there, I am just in 3 lists and that's all.

Also i use protonmail currently as I've started migrating from yahoo 2 years ago (old e-mails still there, I open that e-mail like once per month).

Do the same, you'll be free. Also you can use an e-mail account outside of google domain to actually create a google account, if you really need one.

This was to work on an API integration.

It absolutely is a problem for a large amount of people.

> Do the same, you'll be free

The vast majority of people in the world are not taking the same actions as you are. Therefore this is a large problem for many many people.

Better education for how digital services work and how to properly handle your digital identity is the right way to handle this. Implementing regulation and cementing the "major" e-mail providers who have the resources to comply will only deepen people's dependence on these corporations.

Do I have 15 emails addresses with 15 different providers? When a form asks for my email address I can only give one, what happens if that provider goes away?

What if a government doesn't like $provider and seizes the business? Now I can't get a reset link/change my password/prove my identity...Many government online services ask for your email these days, so you don't really have much control over that. If you said I am [email protected] and blogs.com dies, you're toast.

Please do explain.

If your email provider goes away, you're screwed. Nobody accounts for this situation. Doubly so when you used an identity provider that has gone bust. The question is, how do YOU imagine imposing regulations on mail providers will change anything in a case like this?

Store your credentials, make backups of your emails, don't use identity systems. If things really do go bust, you'll retain access until you can get manual changes made to your accounts.

The other obvious solution is to have identity/e-mail built-in as part of citizenship and be gauranteed by your government.

If you want to solve this problem you have to spend some money somewhere otherwise you are simply demanding providers give you services, for free, forever, not something that seems realistic?

In the worst case scenario you'd have time to setup a new domain and move everything over. Annoying yes, but again extraordinarily rare.

As email's importance approaches a utility like physical postal service it's reasonable to expect some regulation. So long as the regulation is independently developed and balances the needs of consumers and producers then it shouldn't be too burdensome for competition to exist.

In the worst case taxes could pay out to whichever provider one chooses.

I’m not saying it’s an unworthy cause to advocate a change but I’m just not seeing the moral weight compared to factory farming, and other hard industries that have an effect on societies and the planet.

Email ends up being the form of online identity for a lot of people, myself included, so that almost every service that I sign for has my email address as ID. If that email address isn't the ID, it's the preferred way of resetting passwords. I wouldn't be super happy about Facebook being my online ID, nor my cell phone number (see SIM swapping problems).

It's life changing in the same way that losing all your personal documents in a fire sets you up accounting nightmares. Moreover, you're making very light a situation about losing all your pictures. I'm not talking about food pictures, but there's plenty of "me" that's contained in being able to look at pictures of important events of my life (which is why I don't rely only on cloud backups for that).

I don't know what's "life changing" to you, then.

Should I diversify? Probably, but that's more things to secure and keep track of.