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> Should we own the free stuff we pay for? We should own our own stuff. Your email is your own data. No company should have the right to arbitrarily destroy

> Should we own the free stuff we pay for? We should own our own stuff. Your email is your own data. No company should have the right to arbitrarily destroy or block your access to your data. Whether that service is free or paid for is irrelevant; offering a service for free isn't a license to rob and destroy. I've argued this point multiple times (e.g [0]). Business who host your data should treat your data as your property and take responsibility for it. They don't have right to destroy it or put it through a virtual shredder any more than your landlord or car service should take your property to the junkyard. I also consider it a security issue [1]; if you can't access your data (or worse: it's gone all of a sudden), security has failed. No, destroying data isn't the same as securing it. Google has poor security. Security should protect your data and your access to it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30242824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30242824 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30055397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30055397 Unfortunately law seemingly hasn't quite caught up with the idea of digital property. Notice that Google's automatic suspensions may very well be illegal under GDPR. This was discussed here recently [2]. Having been rejected a credit card application (an example of a decision that should't be made automatically, under GDPR [3]) and lost access to a gmail account, I can say the latter was much worse. [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30138669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30138669 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30140312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30140312 I host my own email these days, and I am my own domain registrar. If someone wants to take away my domain, they have to take it up with my government.

ekanes 5y ago
I’ve never heard of someone being their own registrar. Was this hard to set up?
- foxfluff 5y ago
  It was about five minutes of filling a form with the national authority. There are some responsibilities that you get along with it (e.g. you're supposed to do risk assessment and document your approach to risks and security, etc.) but you don't actually have to deliver those documents unless they ask for it. They may also require you to respond to some questionnaires and such (I've received only one questionnaire over the years; they were conducting a study about how registrars verify the identity of their customers). Obviously these are primarily intended for commercial operators who have responsibility for customers' domains, and my risk assessment offering domains for myself is going to look pretty simple so I haven't actually written anything down. Will do if/when requested. Excerpt from my whois records: Holder holder.............: Private person Registrar registrar..........: Private person (It used to have my name along with other info in the registrar field, but this thankfully changed following GDPR)
  - megous 5y ago
    Here, I'd have to do it on a company, and it would cost $9000 upfront and $2800/year. Not worth it. :) Free domain lock against NS changes and domain transfers with national TLD authority seems good enough.
DharmaPolice 5y ago
I do wonder if the whole data ownership thing has become somewhat confused by the regular usage of "your data" to mean data about you. My email is my data. Facebook's record of how many times I've logged in isn't my data, it's data about me. There should be regulations on what corporations can do with data about me but it's fundamentally different from "my data".

ekanes 5y ago

I’ve never heard of someone being their own registrar. Was this hard to set up?

foxfluff 5y ago
It was about five minutes of filling a form with the national authority. There are some responsibilities that you get along with it (e.g. you're supposed to do risk assessment and document your approach to risks and security, etc.) but you don't actually have to deliver those documents unless they ask for it. They may also require you to respond to some questionnaires and such (I've received only one questionnaire over the years; they were conducting a study about how registrars verify the identity of their customers). Obviously these are primarily intended for commercial operators who have responsibility for customers' domains, and my risk assessment offering domains for myself is going to look pretty simple so I haven't actually written anything down. Will do if/when requested. Excerpt from my whois records: Holder holder.............: Private person Registrar registrar..........: Private person (It used to have my name along with other info in the registrar field, but this thankfully changed following GDPR)
- megous 5y ago
  Here, I'd have to do it on a company, and it would cost $9000 upfront and $2800/year. Not worth it. :) Free domain lock against NS changes and domain transfers with national TLD authority seems good enough.

DharmaPolice 5y ago

I do wonder if the whole data ownership thing has become somewhat confused by the regular usage of "your data" to mean data about you. My email is my data. Facebook's record of how many times I've logged in isn't my data, it's data about me. There should be regulations on what corporations can do with data about me but it's fundamentally different from "my data".