At the Mercy of Internet Services

Here's a very scary LOCUS column by Cory Doctorow about Google users arbitrarily losing their e-mail accounts and access to all their files with no explanation or recourse. He labels this possibility a "nightmare scenario," not an exaggeration in view of the two examples he describes:

Unpersoned

An author lost her works in progress, stored in Google Docs, for alleged "inappropriate" content, never specified or explained. Far worse, the victim in the other example ("Mark"), who'd been getting his e-mail, cell phone service, photo storage, document storage, and several other services through Google, lost access to literally everything in his life that relied on technology more advanced than old-style paper mail. "Google defended its decision to permanently delete all of Mark’s data and cut him off from every account for every service he’d ever signed up for (without his email, SMS, and Authenticator codes, Mark was locked out of virtually every digital service he used)."

Doctorow suggests several potential solutions to the problem of service provider overreach. His concluding summary concedes that those companies have the right to deny service to customers under some conditions:

"But when they say they want to eject some of those users and deny them forwarding service and their own data, they’re saying they should have the right to make the people they don’t like vanish. That’s more power than anyone should have — and far more power than the platforms deserve."

This essay vindicates my own established habits. The idea of depending entirely on a cloud to store my personal documents would have given me the creeps even before reading about these abuses. Of course I save everything on my own hard drive. Of course I have more than one e-mail account. And I would never consider giving up our old reliable landline phone. I regard the cell phone as a useful backup for making and receiving calls away from home, not the primary core of my electronic existence. "Mark" got in trouble because a picture he transmitted to a pediatrician from his cell was synched to his Google photo file. The only cloud storage I have anything synched to is OneDrive, for backing up my documents and pictures. And naturally, again, they're all on my hard drive, too. It's bad enough knowing any book I've bought through Kindle could be obliterated by Amazon at any time (although this has never happened to me). I ignore the suggestions on some websites to sign in with Google or Facebook rather than the password saved on the individual sites.

Yet to give up online banking and other internet services we've come to rely on would be too great an inconvenience. How can we strike a balance between the practical necessity for online access to function in daily life nowadays and the risks of having our virtual lives snatched out of our own control? At least, however, it would seem reckless to keep all one's electronic eggs in one omnipotent basket.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.