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> Imagine you have spent much of your digital life for the last 12 years on Google. You rely on their mail and calendar, Google Drive for storage and Google Pho
by oxplot 9y ago
> Imagine you have spent much of your digital life for the last 12 years on Google. You rely on their mail and calendar, Google Drive for storage and Google Photos for your photo archive.
Like I've said in the past here [1], if something is so important to you, you need to treat it as such. Continuing to use a service that offers no guarantees, availability or even continuing access to your account is a sign of ignorance, when you rely on that service so much.
Now ignorance is not the fault of the user. It's primarily the failure of education. There are multiple deficiencies at play here:
1. Lack of knowledge of general population about significance of terms of service, and literacy to read and understand them.
2. Lack of regulation to enforce service providers to provide concise and less technical terms of service.
3. Lack of clear options provided by the service provider for users, so that if a paid option with guarantees is available, it's easy to sign up for and use.
In case of Google, you can, for $60 a year, have an email account under your own domain (which by the way decouples you from Google if you wish to move to another provider in the future), a 24/7 phone support and other goodies. The issue is the number of hoops you need to jump through to set that up, making it inaccessible for the average user. This is Google's fault.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6839142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6839142
- bitmapbrother 9y ago>Like I've said in the past here, if something is so important to you, you need to treat it as such. Which is why you use a password manager and keep a copy of your Google account backup codes in the event you need them.
- nasredin 9y agoGoogle can lock you out of your account even if you have the right password.
- jschwartzi 9y agoYou don't have to use the business option. There's a paid subscription for $5 a month that has the same level of support. Being able to call someone means you can tie up a $20/hour resource until you can log back in to your account.
- Asooka 9y agoCan you, or someone else, point to an alternative to gmail that won't decide to lock me out of my account and still offers generous data storage?
- jopsen 9y agoI think GPs point is that it shouldn't be free. But yeah, fastmail have a decent reputation.. and they are known for improper verification (which they've hopefully fixed). Seriously though, 2FA and recovery codes is the way to protect important accounts!
- oxplot 9y agoGoogle will give you a chance to move your data out of their cloud should they decide to kick you out. This option is available if you pay for the GSuites (their business plans) which I mentioned above. Any provider has the right to terminate your account for variety of reasons even if you're a paid customer.
- muninn_ 9y agoSure, I believe iCloud Drive is $2.99/mo for 200GB. Unless you meant something that was "free".
- tlogan 9y agoThe main problem is that people do not want to pay. Simple as that. For example, I met so many real estate agents which refuse to have G Suite and pay $60/year because it is "too expensive".