What if your Google account was blocked tomorrow?
Irreversibly blocked, lost forever. You tried everything, but it's
not gonna happen, you can't contact some human at google who can see
that clearly, there's been a mistake, or run over things with you so
you can explain what happened, or explain that nothing happened.
Take a few moments to reflect on this, try making a mental map of the data
you've got in their cloud, what it means and what kind of impact it'd have
if it was Just Gone (tm).
I'm a pretty privacy-oriented person in many ways, I keep _A_LOT_ of data
on my own systems (and their backups), and I don't use dropbox or drive,
except for one-off transfers to people. My photos are not in "the cloud",
they are on three different computers in two physical locations, on raidz2
and raidz3 filesystems with scrubbing, one of the computers is physically
disconnected from mains power when not being backed-up onto.
Short story: I care about my data, a lot.
Longer story: I'd still be fucked, in a bad way, if I lost my account tomorrow.
I've hosted my own mail, on my own server, in my own home, on my own connection
since 2001, i like things this way, it's MINE, but, times are a-Changin' and
I've been less and less certain that I'll be guaranteed this privilege forever.
There was a short time, when my new ISP couldn't manage to allow me to send
E-Mail, not even through their smarthost (support didn't know what it was)
after a lot of social-engineering, I found out that they pretty much no longer
have the infrastructure to allow people to send E-Mail out onto the Internet.
TLDR: I started using "that gmail account I made for using android.."
And the convenience trapped me, the application is pretty good, and it works
great between my desktop and my phone. So, I got trapped.
As I've written before, we have no human right to an email account, so each
of us is tasked with achieving one, one that is private, secure, and ours
forever. A straight out impossible task. Should I continue with my self-hosted
solution, which I am in full control of, but may at some point simply lose the
privilege to host ? Should I go with the offering from gmail or another private
company, who may at any time decide to disable my account, and who is not bound
to provide this service to me ? I'd prefer if the state of Denmark issued each
of its citizens an email account, one that I had a legal right to demand.
They almost do, but it's not compatible with normal E-Mail, and nobody knows
their own "address", so it's unusable as a general E-Mail account.
I digress.
How do we solve this?
How do we ensure that, just as we have the right to exist in this world,
we also have a right to exist online ?
While we ponder this probem, maybe backburning it,
maybe we should do a backup of those things of ours,
that we've forgot to save to local storage.
