Comment by tonymet
2 months ago
I back up regularly using Google Takeout and similar tools, but I don’t think it’s fair to shame this author . Even if you have backups , your recent and essential content and credentials will be locked out . 1% of your content is the most important
We all depend heavily on cloud storage and sso . Everything works fine until you are locked out .
And using them isn’t fully voluntary. They are necessary for collaboration . You end up using what your team uses .
You can try to be that “own cloud” snob but it only works if you live in a basement
Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more. That’s 4+ single points of failure
You’re just not imaginative enough if you think you’re safe .
OPs only recourse is an insider or a lawyer
Lot of arrogant people here who think they are safe and better than anybody and blame OP.
It is totally normal in today’s world to depend on cloud services and reasonably difficult to do without it. In China: no WeChat you are practically dead. Here try to join meetings without account, try to send a message on WhatsApp without account, etc… a lot can go wrong very fast. What if you used your Apple account as SSO to other services ?
> Lot of arrogant people here who think they are safe and better than anybody and blame OP.
You see this a lot in the Apple "community". Apple can _never_ do wrong. Apple can _never_ make a mistake. Apple's choices are _always_ the best choices.
I don't understand why people put corporations on pedestals.
Corporations play the role of gods in our society.
edit: about the same role as Greek or Roman gods.
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Because their TC is $400,000 and they need it to justify their Bay Area mortgage. Come on, folks, follow the money.
Commentators here presumably work in the industry, possibly even for 'the big companies' (I'd say FAANG but any big, life-depending, big-architecture corp, but you know what I mean, basically)
They should be tripping over themselves of "How can we fix our corporate incentives to actually deal with customer problems". Not "lol OP, sux"
Crazy how the industry with the biggest margins has the worst contempt for their customers
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Very true. And account integrity check pointing is stochastic and more aggressive so at any time there are people being locked out .
One of 20 of your services could lock you out tomorrow and that means you’re blocked from coworkers and family
The root issue/risk is from cascading service dependencies, and I'm 99% sure this is done unintentionally at Apple et al.
Team builds service. Service depends on first party identity/authentication because it's easier.
... Fast forward 20 years, and no one at platform company even understands the dependency graph from a customer perspective anymore. Especially in the case of rare events like account locks.
Consequently, those customers face a sudden Kafkaesque maze of edge cases that don't line up, as the customer service processes people are funneled through are literally incapable of solving the problem.
Which means the entire "normal" customer support apparatus is unavailable to them. (The same apparatus companies aggressive shove all support through)
This is why there should be regulatory requirements for identity platforms mandating the ability to speak to a human who's empowered to fix your issue + an option for customer-choice decision arbitration + continuous random sample audits with penalties for falling below KPIs (timeliness, correctness, etc).
It should literally be illegal for a company to have their banning system 'oops' and then pretend they don't know you.
Because it's only going to get worse as more AI / probably correct methods infuse account security functions.
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it's not just about cloud service dependency, or his loyalty to Apple, or things like that. for important data you _have_ to have backups, 3-2-1 rule and all that. the fact he put all the eggs in Apple's bucket is beyond me.
sure i am dependent to cloud services as much as he is, much to my own chagrin, but at least i have all my data backed up??
I’ve interpreted it as a sort of head-in-sand coping mechanism for those low-likelihood, high-consequence events people feel powerless over. It’s less distressing to be powerless if you decide that the real issue was a fault by the victim and not a powerlessness you have in common with the victim.
You’re right that nearly all responses are emotional , to maintain internal consistency. Even purchasing large gift cards is a common discounting approach when paying for cloud .
The sad news is when important people get locked out they can call dedicated support . This case was of someone who wasn’t celebrity enough to have that access
Oh I doubt it was his fault. I had something similar happen setting up a phone for a neighbor. Apple decided it was fraudulent after I added her address to the account. It was now dead with no recourse. At least I didn’t spend much on a used phone. Picked up an android and said it’s time to adapt.
I love your comment and I could not just upvote it because it is true with so many things. The technocracy/corpocracy is trying to sell you things that mnake you believe you can have power over everything, even your life. Anyone who "fails" at anything, it is all your fault. I have literally been told my mental illness, and my current homelessness, is my fault because I did not do the right thing. The power and control people think they have over their lives is a paper thin delusion.
Our shared powerlessness should bring us in communion with others, but the technocracy/corpocracy wants to rip that apart and make us dependent on them for profit.
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Surprised at the downvotes to your excellent comment.
Good insight - that people dunk on the author as a cope to help the dunker feel less powerless
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It is possible to suggest preventative/corrective action without blaming OP. I find it kind of sad that you can't make helpful suggestions (to future potential victims) without someone saying you're "victim blaming."
you're right there's a fine line. I interpreted the tone of most as judgmental / critical.
saying "get a lawyer" or "file a complaint" is constructive. saying " it's your fault for not backing up" or "that's what you get by using cloud" is just judgmental. Neither are practical solutions, regardless. Even with perfect backups it would have happened. And for 99% of social people, it's impossible not to cloud.
> t. What if you used your Apple account as SSO to other services ?
Your own wrongdoing. Always use a site-specific auth method, i.e. by email. And a separate email for each site.
Using a separate email address for each site is smart, but creating a separate email account for each site is going to be very tedious, and I imagine Google, Yahoo, etc are going to stop you very quickly after you've opened 20+ accounts with the same phone number.
(Use a catch-all to have different email addresses for different sites, because when one gets hacked, then the damage is limited.)
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I have content on Google and Dropbox but I have live backups. It would be very annoying to be locked out of Google, but I would not lose any data. Anyone can have a NAS, you don't need a while basement or to live inside of one (??!?)
Yes, those companies should absolutely be forbidden to behave like this, and punished heavily when they do. But until it happens (which doesn't look like it will), your data is your responsibility.
You lose the Google content , since the export is lossy (docs , sheets, slides , etc) . And most of the value is collaborative . You’ll lose anything that you contribute to that’s not in your account . You’ll lose credentials (eg sso to third parties ), messaging access .
You’ll lose indexing and metadata , like Google Drive search , Google Photos search , thumbnails .
It’s a myth to assume the value is in the backup. Most of the value you have is in the access and the application
I don't have anything serious on Google drive, just some files I share with third parties that primarily exist on my network; and certainly no photos. Photos are on my NAS which is backed up on several disks; I publish them on a small app that I built, self-hosted (after years with Smugmug I left them two years ago).
Most accounts with third parties use domains I own that are not on Google in any way. Some still use a gmail address and I need to migrate those. But nothing essential.
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Yeah, the living in a basement comment was a strange rhetorical exaggeration, as if you have to be feeding and caring for your server 24/7, haha
It means people that don’t use cloud at all can’t possibly work with anyone else
It's a joke.
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What tools are you performing live backups with ? I can think of rclone running , but gdrive/icloud doesn’t send change lists
You can run rclone every couple minutes on your NAS, it checks mtimes like rsync so it is reasonably efficient for most cases, though you may run into ratelimits with bigger data.
Google Photos deliberately broke all backup tools in March, so there's that.
Yes you can still mostly do Takeout, but it's garbage. (not incremental. Requires me to remember. duplicates files for every album (total incompetence). downloads regularly fail. Requires more room than I have on my mac to decompress so I have to put it on an external drive.)
I am not depending on cloud storage at all. What do I need to upload onto some cloud? And when I need to sync between devices, or rather want to sync, then I have a Syncthing setup on my server running. No cloud. And copies on participating devices.
Sure, it is not directly their fault, when they are treated badly by big tech. Though of course they could have been more careful, and rely less on big tech and cloud. We can all learn from this example, like many others before this one.
How do you collaborate ? Do you have friends ? A job ? I’m not being rhetorical —- it’s very rare to have friends or a job and not have some ties to the cloud. Even my tiny HOA manages its record in the cloud
> How do you collaborate ?
I commit code. I pair program. I share screen. That sort of thing. Code is mostly set up to have reproducible results. If it is not working on the other machine, then that's a bug and we need to solve it. There is not much collaboration I need to be doing in my free time. What I did on the last job is not what I depend on, but what a business thought they depend on. That's their stuff. If it fails because of some cloud ban or outage, not my problem.
When I need to share files with friends, I send them the files. Or I use Copyparty. Or, if they are more technically minded, I use Syncthing. For not so technical friends, I don't have to share 10k photos at once. Maybe I will send them a few photos via a messenger. Or some files they need via a messenger or have them on Copyparty, if needed often or again in the future. There is no issue.
> Do you have friends ?
Yes.
> A job ?
Had, and probably soon will have again, but I don't know what that has to do with what I depend on. If my job prescribes some cloud usage that is unnecessary, I guess I can try and show an alternative and begrudgingly accept that I have to use shitty tooling. But if somehow it is made impossible for me to use that, then it is their job to find an alternative. I am never the one prescribing it, and I myself don't depend on cloud.
> I’m not being rhetorical —- it’s very rare to have friends or a job and not have some ties to the cloud. Even my tiny HOA manages its record in the cloud
I surely have friends, who probably use some MS or Google cloud stuff. But that's their problem, not mine. I don't depend on that. And they don't share that much stuff with me, that there is sufficient incentive to start depending on it. And if they did, I would tell them, that I don't want to make a shitty account on MS or Google cloud storage thingies.
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Presumably, as the GP said, you're not a normal person and you live in a basement. >sigh< (I'm with a lot of what the GP said but they didn't need to be insulting.)
The solutions self-hosting storage for non-technical people are terrible. Presumably there's no market for selling a solution that gives individuals data sovereignty. I would guess the margin isn't there and a recurring subscription for something you own is probably unpalatable to a lot of consumers. So this is what we get.
The main side-effect is the lack of trust and integration. For example, if you self-host your email (or more realistically push it on a VPS), then the moment you want to send an e-mail you are going to be marked as spam.
To register on some websites you may sometimes receive: “please use real email from gmail/outlook/etc”.
When you have a business meeting with a customer: “oh just install Jitsi on your mobile phone” is the best way to lose a sale.
Or no way to pay train tickets because you cannot install the app because your Apple / Play Store account is locked.
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> there's no market for selling a solution that gives individuals data sovereignty
Theres no turnkey solution (of course not, it is prohibitively complex to architect one), but the bits and pieces are there, built on tried and tested software. For example, SMB and rsync and their clients, are practically enough to do backups.
Sovereignty also means responsibility. Either you have to keep your network secure, or you pay someone else do it (not always very well), otherwise you get security problems. Same goes for redundants backups, hardware maintenance, etc.
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It could be a reasonable opinion, but unfortunate choice of words made it angry (and FWIW snobbish) towards wrong people.
apparently those living in basements are a protected class? English depends on idioms, you know.
> Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more.
So, fallacy aside, the abnormals would be...
a) people that don't tech, and b) people that saw the writing on the wall years ago, and either didn't trust the system and didn'tget into it, or those that did for a while, and got tfo.
?
Off topic, but I'm curious. Why are you typing spaces before every period and comma?
Maybe iPhone is adding those ?
First of all, you don't have to care about this, unless you are wanting something from others and you depend on others and their opinion about your writing significantly.
That said, it does make your writing seem very odd. A little bit like the people, who apparently don't know what the shift key does, or how to trigger capital letters on their phones or something, and write only in lowercase letters.
Just because your phone does something silly, and it is not you doing it intentionally, that doesn't mean, that other people will not get a weird impression from you writing like that. In a way, you are letting your phone change the impression others are getting from your writing. And that impression is for many people that they wonder, whether you know the conventions of writing.
Now, like I said, you don't have to care about this. But if you want your texts to not come across like teenager written texts or low effort texts, it would be a good idea to fix your phone's silly settings, so that it doesn't do that to your writing.
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For what it’s worth, I remember having this issue with Samsung OneUI keyboard when it was in French. In French there is this rule there that you should put a space before “?” and “!”, so perhaps their developers understood “all punctuation” or something.
I wonder what is his case.
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How precisely do you reckon a lawyer would help?
The legal Deparment runs most companies . They are the only way to get something bespoke done (like unlocking an account ). And companies are terrified of discovery.
Any lawyer can file a complaint in small claims . OP has paid for a service and has a contract
TOS is binding to both parties .
Didn't they boot him for a ToS violation?
> Any lawyer can file a complaint in small claims .
No, in many states _no_ lawyer can file a complaint (except his own) in small claims court.
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>You can try to be that “own cloud” snob but it only works if you live in a basement
WTF is this about? So you think anyone proficient in hardware/software lives in a basement? This kind of derogatory statement does not belong on HN.
Own cloud is a fun hobby. Exclusively owncloud is entirely impractical.
It’s the snobby part that I’m critical of
> Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more. That’s 4+ single points of failure.
Well, i don't. I have my local file storage. Contacts and Calendar get synched, thats it. These get lcal backups, but aren't important so or so.
Not saying this in a derogatory way, but that pretty much means you are not a "normal" user but someone who is tech savvy enough to not rely on someone else's cloud.
And yet all it takes is buying a piece of hardware and installing an app, something that plenty of "normal" people do every day.
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Right, they said normal person.
How do you collaborate with your coworkers , customers and friends ? What industry are you in ?
Want to bet we can find holes in your solution too?
I get what you're saying but implying someone who doesn't use the cloud is not a "normal person" and lives in a basement is needlessly condescending.
Not an average or "normal" computer user? Granted. Not a normal person? No.
> Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more. That’s 4+ single points of failure
It only means that the content is not valuable for them. I know people who created Google Account only because the phone required them to and they do not even remember the password or username, and do not use Gmail (why use email when there is Telegram). If they lose the phone, they would just probably make a new account.
If you were an investor or trader, managing millions of dollars, would you keep the only copy of critical information in a cloud? I don't think so if you are a reasonable person. Would you keep the only copy of a cryptowallet key in a cloud?
Plenty of huge businesses keep all their critical data in the cloud. If they were banned from Microsoft 365 they would instantly go out of business.
> If they were banned from Microsoft 365 they would instantly go out of business.
Seeing how Microsoft is doing, they’re going to learn this lesson sooner or later.
Average users have no idea what of their information is in the cloud or not. Even if they did, they have no idea of the implications.
> If you were an investor or trader, managing millions of dollars, would you keep the only copy of critical information in a cloud?
I don't think the idea that they could lose access to their accounts occurs to most people. I've done enough business continuity and disaster recovery work with small business to be confident in saying it doesn't occur to small business owners. I'm not sure why individuals would be any different.
It's very hard to put yourself in the mindset of a non-technical person.
> I don't think the idea that they could lose access to their accounts occurs to most people
Most people do not store anything valuable in the cloud anyway. The only problem is that they won't be able to login into Windows if MS bans the account, and they won't be able to install apps if Google bans their account along with phone serial number.
> I don't think the idea that they could lose access to their accounts occurs to most people.
"It just works" was practically a mantra for Steve Jobs, now we turn around and blame users for thinking that it will work
Yes it happens constantly. I know many businesses who have their assets in the cloud .
Backup sounds nice and is necessary but is always out of date and recovery is totally impractical .
Many/most of the assets like indexes , references & creds can’t be reasonably backed up and recovered .