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Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

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Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#221

Post by Kon-Peki »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #156
tsatsawayy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most cars do not do this. Teslas are famous for their DRM, restrictive connectivity, and shady upsells. Those will show up in the "cons" column of any honest review. A normal car in 2022 will not constantly surveil you. No critical functionality is tied to an online account in any non-Tesla mass-produced car that I am aware of.

Neither of these points are true. Other manufacturers like Toyota are getting into the "features as a service" game with things like keyless entry. On the surveillance point, I worked for an auto software company that partnered with a big auto manufacturer on a feature. We were granted access to an API that could geolocate any vehicle made by this company in real-time given its VIN. I volunteered my car's VIN to test…

This is true, for example:

https://www.toyota.com/privacyvts/

You do have the ability to opt-out, but it's not usually a simple process.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#222

Post by iamjkt »

Hizonner wrote: post #197

> But I lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login, besides all Google's services ( GCP, firebase, youtube premium, google one, subscriptions paid through play store, google ads, etc, etc). So you gave Google total control over your entire online presence, tying a bunch of things you depend on into a tight bundle that would all get banned at once. And, by including so many things, you created mo…

It's not even targeted at me and I found this painful to read.

The point you suggested that hosting their own email server is the most trivial step they could do to solve the problem is when I switched off.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#223

Post by kojeovo »

jventura wrote: post #140
moreira wrote: post #51

> lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login I signed up to Quora with my Facebook account, back in the day. Deleted Facebook in 2013 and lost access to my Quora account, with no possible way to recover it. I haven't used a social login since. In my case, it was fairly harmless, but it made me realise how dangerous social login is. Every time there's a signup, I look for "signup with email". It'…

> Deleted Facebook in 2013 and lost access to my Quora account, with no possible way to recover it. Did the same but lost my Spotify account. Needless to say, but I haven’t used Spotify since then..

They may have fixed this. Either that or I did something explicitly that resulted in my Spotify account being accessible by the email I used on FB.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#224

Post by kobalsky »

mminer237 wrote: post #192

You can't compel a company to provide you with a service. That's a little too close to slavery for society's taste. If a company doesn't provide you with a service you agreed to, you can get damages from a court, but you have to use such services as your contract agreed. It stinks to end up on the wrong end, but that's part of the cost of getting such massive benefits for free. If you want something more reliable or…

> You can't compel a company to provide you with a service. That's a little too close to slavery for society's taste

maybe global scale monstruous corporations should be held to a different set of standards than mom & pop shops.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#225

Post by visarga »

estaseuropano wrote: post #176
fdewnijfwg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you even solve porting without breaking legacy systems? You can point the MX records to another provider's server (or your own), but porting single email addresses won't really work.

You could easily oblige forwarding. You cannot shut someone out and then not allow them a) a backup of all data noe unavailable and b) and auto forward to an email of their choice.

Forwarding won't be enough if you need to reply from the same email address.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#226

Post by DharmaPolice »

foxfluff wrote: post #43

> 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…

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".

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#227

Post by svnt »

rglullis wrote: post #67
londons_explore wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really needs to be a zero cost custom-domain email hosting solution. I'd love to have webmail on my own domain, hosted by someone else, and with ads on the side. Those ads should generate ~$20 per user per year (after all, they can be targeted based on emails I'm sending and receiving, and I'll be looking at them many minutes every day - the perfect combination for high revenue ads). With $20/user/year, there s…

Why can't you just go around selling your data to the highest bidders and use the money to pay for the myriad of already-existing hosting providers? I'll tell you why: because you are not worth that much to advertisers. If you are so cheap to the point of asking to get your data harvested, chances are you never going to be a high-value customer.

The issue is far more likely the low volume transaction (of one user) which is itself likely to be a consequence of lack of demand/reason for this service so far.

No one is set up to explicitly monetize your data with consent. It doesn’t seem like a bad idea once society catches up with it.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#228

Post by oauea »

stickfigure wrote: post #209
randunel wrote: post #45

Phone number porting is a thing due to regulation. I'm looking forward to having email address porting legislation, one day. For full porting, there's a long road ahead, starting with regulating domain names, which email addresses depend on. However, as long as the domain name _de facto_ remains in the possession of the original provider, this is technically possible, already. Email address porting might even be poss…

We have email porting already. With a custom domain, you can point it at any mail host you like. It costs a few bucks a year. There's no reason for a complicated legal structure to ensure mail forwarding (which just begs for abuse). Users already have the power. Use it.

Are you volunteering to call my grandma and walk her through setting that up? Are you also going to pay the yearly domain fees? No? The legal framework needs some work.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#229

Post by Hizonner »

samtho wrote: post #206
Hizonner wrote: post #197

> But I lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login, besides all Google's services ( GCP, firebase, youtube premium, google one, subscriptions paid through play store, google ads, etc, etc). So you gave Google total control over your entire online presence, tying a bunch of things you depend on into a tight bundle that would all get banned at once. And, by including so many things, you created mo…

There is a lot of victim blaming here. If Google wishes to continue to provide an email service, it should be a reasonable expectation that you don’t get your account disabled due to some automated false positive or at least have a real appeal process to reenable it. Because the opposite is true, it’s a bigger systemic problem that should be addressed one way or another.

I agree. And the fastest, most effective way to address it is for people to stop encouraging it by using Google's email or authentication services. Among other things.

If you then also want to outlaw lazy, hair-trigger account cancellations, and all the other stuff these guys do to shift all effort and risk onto their users, and for that matter all the other hidden ways they exploit the users, then I won't complain. I'll even cheer you on. But I probably won't live long enough to see that. And after those (completely proper) laws were enacted, I would expect a lot of these "free" services to go away entirely. Requiring them to do it right would also require them to pay the cost to do it right, and I would expect that to get passed on to the users.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#230

Post by oauea »

g_p wrote: post #167
londons_explore wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine it takes the form of a government "porting server", where anyone can query an email address and receive back a different target email address. All people sending email will be required by law to first consult the porting server to determine where to send email. It could be as simple as an http endpoint. Total development costs and running costs could be pretty low - low enough that the government can…

Rather than creating a central "government porting server", you could make this a "cost of doing business" of someone wishing to provide an email service to the public. In the event that an ISP or digital services provider wishes to cease providing email service, they could be required to provide minimal access to enable updated provision of either a forwarding email address (which the provider would forward mail to)…

> who wants to use their own IP ranges to relay potential spam to former users

In your example, anyone who wants to legally run an email hosting business.

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