Except, for the vast majority of people, that is definitely not true. It's actually extremely rare for your average person to get locked out of their Google account (though, of course, it does happen, as chronicled so frequently on HN). It's extremely
common for people to lose their hard drive, or have it otherwise damaged by a fall or fire, or just have it crash due to age without a sufficient backup.
It order to fix the problems with modern corporate surveillance, we can't keep pretending that storing things in the cloud and using cloud services doesn't have huge benefits. Just telling everyone to only store things in flat files on their local disk just brings up the "old man yells at cloud" meme in my head.
What we need are stronger laws. For example, if one company is acquired by another, and that company demands a new login scheme that can link additional data, I think they should need to give you the option of a full refund.
It order to fix the problems with modern corporate surveillance, we can't keep pretending that storing things in the cloud and using cloud services doesn't have huge benefits. Just telling everyone to only store things in flat files on their local disk just brings up the "old man yells at cloud" meme in my head.
What we need are stronger laws. For example, if one company is acquired by another, and that company demands a new login scheme that can link additional data, I think they should need to give you the option of a full refund.