[mschuster91]

> Getting banned by Google/Facebook and losing all your data in the cloud is just the modern equivalent of losing everything when your hard drive dies. The way to mitigate this danger is the same.

No it's not. A HDD failing or getting lost? That can be guarded against with backups.

With getting banned by Google or Facebook? When all your accounts, your identity is tied to that address/account and you get banned, you cannot be reached anymore by people who don't know that you got screwed over.

The obvious solution would be to self-host an email server, but unfortunately that's impossible as it will be mercilessly assaulted by spammers and hackers on the inbound side and you'll be having issues with deliverability on the outbound side.

The real solution would be for legislative and regulatory action that recognizes the importance of identity and forces all email providers to adhere to due process. But unfortunately, worldwide legislators are too old / too incompetent or in the pockets of other people who don't care...

[unishark]

> No it's not. A HDD failing or getting lost? That can be guarded against with backups.

Exactly. Back up your cloud data.

> With getting banned by Google or Facebook? When all your accounts, your identity is tied to that address/account and you get banned, you cannot be reached anymore by people who don't know that you got screwed over.

I thought the fact that I consider this perspective to be absurd was kind of obviously built in to my statement.

You can use a new email to contact people. Especially when you have your backups.

[beagle3]

Google effectively killfiled a domain I run. It took me a few months to figure out, but about 95% of emails sent to @gmail.com or g-suite hosted addresses from that domain (which were, overall ~20% of emails sent), got into a spam folder.

No recourse, no one to talk to; my solution was to switch from a small but reputable ISP I had used for 17 years (and which never had a single spam complaint or blacklist entry in any list I can read) to fastmail for that domain; because Google decided they didn't like something about that setup; already spent a couple of work days no one was paying for to troubleshoot and eventually gave up.

Google+Microsoft+FastMail likely cover 95% of your recipients. If they don't like you, you're going to have a very hard time reaching people.

[mschuster91]

> I thought the fact that I consider this perspective to be absurd was kind of obviously built in to my statement.

It is not absurd, it is reality. With emails you at least can manually walk through the hundreds of sites you have stored in your password manager, hope that the password still works and you did not encounter a site that got hacked and reset all the passwords, and change the email address... but with "sign in with Facebook/Apple ID/..." you are at the mercy of the target site having a fallback login mechanism. (Hint: many don't or it's buggy because never tested)

[unishark]

Ultimately this is just more information in the cloud which you failed to back up.

I end up having to reset forgotten passwords a lot (maybe dozens of times per year) and don't think I've ever encountered a reset situation like you describe. If it's important I can always call them to resolve an account problem. If it's unimportant I can make a new account.

[beagle3]

If it’s an account that’s not tied to anything important, sure; But if it’s tied to a bank account, credit card, utility bill etc, it’s often not as easy to “just make a new account”. You’ll likely need to fax a copy of your id to a fraud department who’ll take their time.

A friend of mine has been unable to convince a credit agency to reset their password as they are out of the country and cannot fulfill the requested authentication task. Wouldn’t be a problem in normal times, as they are back and forth every other month. Except it’s been 7 months since corona disrupted that. They can’t just “sign up for a new account” as it tied to their identity.

I’ve never had this problem myself either. But it’s a real problem.

[unishark]

Fair enough, extend the "call them" category to also mean signatures occasionally required by mail. I have had to do that, say with certain rarely-used financial situations. Though not banks, who are very accommodating in my experience (even the notoriously evil ones).

First class mail is working internationally, by the way, to almost every country. Unless they're in Yemen or something perhaps. Keep in mind we were comparing the dangers of corporations to governments. So being in a developing country during a pandemic when there's a communications breakdown with the US also presumably means you can't access a US consulate either. So you'd have the exact same difficulty if it was a govt agency you needed to deal with instead of Google/Facebook/Microsoft.

[beagle3]

Said credit agency has sent a physical notice (by first class mail) to the address they have listed, except it is out of date. It's an authentication catch-22, which is easily solvable for anyone inside the country (and would have been easily solvable for that person in their normal course of life without corona). Not yet kafka level, but the it does bring his name to mind.

And, yes, a government agency would cause the same issues. The thing is, government is (supposedly) accountable to the people, but GoogFaceSoft is accountable to their shareholders. The incentives do not align -- but many of the powers (and abuses of power) do.