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by ObsoleteNerd 2815 days ago
In an ideal world, but in reality companies have been pushing more and more for the opposite, where accounts and services are just being "borrowed" by us for a fee.

The T&C go into great detail to make sure we understand we have no rights to the account/service/product, and that they still own it at all times and can revoke it from us.

Most companies still don't even comprehend that an account to a service can be an important part of someones life. Google locking people out forever over some automated perceived issue, as though it's nothing special and not even worth a cursory glance. Meanwhile that email account could be the central point of that users entire life.

Game accounts can have a serious amount of money, time, love, and effort invested in them. I've been using the same PSN account since the service first launched. I have hundreds of digital games, DLCs, movies, etc. My entire life is also run from my email, tied to everything from paying my rent and bills to managing my kids school through their online services. In the former, I don't play online games on purpose, because I know of the risk of pissing off the wrong kid, and for the latter, I don't use a free email service and control the domain so I can redirect it. Still not perfect though.

We need to take this stuff more seriously.

1 comments

This is why I advocate both 1. Not tying anything important to you to access to an online account that you don’t host yourself, and 2. Not spending money on digital goods that require further permission from a company to use.

People look at me like I’m wearing tin foil, yet these things keep happening where someone’s account gets suspended or they lose access to $1000 of “purchased” digital goods, and they act all surprised that this could happen!

If it’s not on your computer it’s not yours. And even if it is on your computer, but you need to activate it, it’s still not yours. Don’t complain when your access suddenly gets revoked—you should know better by now.

But it terrifies me that you say it like it's nothing and like this digital "purchasing" thing is something new (I am not disagreeing, on the contrary.)

I have avoided and have never bought anything digital for those reasons, but it really is depressing that these things have not been solved by now.

It should be terrifying! You’re handing your hard earned money to a company in exchange for access to something narrowly defined in a 100 page Terms of Service document, written by company lawyers, giving them tons of escape clauses, with no input from you. You’re smart to avoid the trap, but unless other people do also, in large numbers, nothing will change.