> are those *really* the rhetorical questions you'd fling at your Aunt Tillie panicking on the phone, because she can't email anybody or renew her important drug
No - I'd be much less sympathetic to my aunt, because if she's panicking on the phone about not being able to email anyone, that means she's a) ignored my advice and rants for 20+ years and then b) had the gall to call me up to try to have me fix the problem that she created by ignoring me for 20+ years.
But I'm not actually really talking about regular people losing their personal email where they happen to keep a few sort-of important things that are relatively-easily replaced/transferred into a safer system. Those people I can sort-of understand, and don't really need to ask my questions - the answer is simple: "I never thought about it until now".
But aunt Tillie doesn't call herself an "entrepreneur" and doesn't rely on the existence of her gmail account for the survival of a business, and she especially doesn't have a blog where she whinges about the fact she did that.
I'm talking about people who should know better, who should be smart and considering things like "what are the existential threats to this business I'm trying to run?", who use gmail for vital business functions like payroll, and who tie their auth for everything else to their google (or whatever other shitty cloud service) accounts.
> the deficiencies we're discussing don't really get publicized
Yeah I'm afraid I'm going to have to challenge this assertion - I've seen variations on this article about ten thousand times. The post I was replying to was pointing out that they've also seen this article about ten thousand times. The
vast majority of people that I have mentioned this problem to (and I do that a lot!) have responded with "oh, yeah, I've heard about that happening to people".
And another thing: my questions are not rhetorical. I am genuinely curious about the thought process that leads to these decisions. See, I didn't actually have to see this article even once - what I did was I gave it about 10 seconds thought, and came to the conclusion that relying on unaccountable third parties for mission-critical business infrastructure is an existential risk. This all seems very obvious and straightforward to me. Perhaps I'm some kind of super genius? I'm doubtful about that.
> These service-outcomes are the outliers in need of repair, not the consumers.
It's both. I agree that there should be some recourse. Show me a thing I can sign to bring in a law requiring all companies to post a phone number where a user can speak to a human and I'll sign it and have everybody I know sign it too.
But if you're not giving any thought to who controls your vital data and you lose it as a result of that, that's at least 50% your fault.