[jakoblorz]

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?

[debazel]

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.

[kouteiheika]

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.

[stephbook]

Can't you just create a new account?

[kouteiheika]

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.

[tavavex]

You better hope that whatever is-this-the-same-user heuristics they have on their side never find out for the duration of your entire life.

[ghosty141]

In his case, I'm pretty sure 20 y/o data is pretty useless nowadays in terms of fingerprinting and usage heuristics.

[illiac786]

Maybe it will be time to have a critical device around, that does not rely on Apple/google and has stuff like eID and other critical digital documents. But this is going to be annoying, carrying two devices. Maybe easier to keep the paper version as backup for such a case.

[jakoblorz]

It might not even have to be a smartphone, but much lighter yubikey style (pk/sk signature) devices.

I hate to say it but the form factor of those crypto hardware wallets might be a good compromise between smartphone and very low level tech. Non-tech folks should be able to use them too, a struggle that the crypto space is constantly working with

[Animats]

Then you can't take a Waymo any more.

[Animats]

Amusingly, the points on this posting have been going up and down quite a bit. Range is -1 to 2 so far.

The point here is that Waymo requires either an Android account or an Apple account to log into their phone app. Lose that and you cannot take a Waymo. This may be worth a formal complaint to the California Public Utilities Commission, because Waymo is regulated as a common carrier.

California civil code section 2170:

"A common carrier must, if able to do so, accept and carry whatever is offered to him, at a reasonable time and place, of a kind that he undertakes or is accustomed to carry. A common carrier must not give preference in time, price, or otherwise, to one person over another."[1]

This is the core of what it is to be a common carrier. An airline can't require that you join their frequent flyer plan to fly.

[1] https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/civil-code/civ-sect-2169/

[hulitu]

> 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.

[jakoblorz]

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]

He's saying the EU's capital city is Washington.