Here's why you should not delete your yahoo account.
Once you delete your account, yahoo will make it available again to everyone.
This means that if you have not unlinked everything it can be used by others to reset accounts on services you forgot that you linked to your yahoo account.
Instead of deleting it, forward it all to another account and stop using it.
Do not forget to log in every 12 months to keep it active.
The Internet works just fine when it's decentralised, but particularly with e-mail, relying on the big service providers (or an ISP-provided address, for that matter) immediately locks you into someone else's systems for no particularly good reason.
Registering your own domain and setting up mail forwarding can be done with any number of services and costs less for a year than many people pay for a week of their cell phone service, and crucially, the domain is registered by some specialist service but is your domain and can be transferred to another service any time you want.
Unfortunately it can be a scary-looking process for non-technical users, but for those with enough confidence to arrange it, I highly recommend it.
The argument for individual domains suggests itself, or an equivalent follows-the-person mechanism.
That's a mighty big "if", though. For any of the TLDs I'm familiar with, there are significant protections against unintended domain transfers, and that has been the case for a long time for the major ones.
It is extremely difficult to unintentionally lose control of a domain that you legitimately register with a respectable registrar.
Any centralised service you use for free can terminate your account on a whim any time they like, give access to an account you used to use to anyone else they like, and so on.
There is some non-zero level of risk in any dealing with a remote service, but I don't think the scale of risk in these two scenarios is even remotely comparable.
Or something like sovereign. https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign
See: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/yahoo-makes-it-difficult-t...
Based on what? Since nuking Geocities Yahoo does not deserve any trust and it has been going steadily down from there.
When Yahoo released a ton of unused accounts, I grabbed my last name (which I use on every service). I occasionally get mail for that email address.
My Yahoo email is several years older than Gmail. It would take a LONG time to migrate to another service.
Why, exactly? mbsync (isync) between the two services, done.
I think this whole "set up a service for everything" concept ain't workin'.
I'm trying to think how much storage just the TOS and Privacy Policies for those would run.
There are also a lot of one-off things that require registration to try out whatever they're offering.
Some appear to just be security notes or stored keys from previous employers; others are imported from 1Password and haven't been used in the entire time I've used LastPass (5 years.)
Some are just fucking baffling, to be honest. What the hell is vodka-hoop.com, and why do I have an entry for it?
Anyway; what's the alternative to "set up a service for everything" that's not a single point of failure? (Although, I guess LastPass is that already.)
Combine this with a strong regime prohibiting inter-enterprise transfers of personal data. So that if Firm A want to talk to Firm B about User X, Firm A submits User X the request, Firm B confirms, and User X either complies or doesn't.
This would ... change certain dynamics of use of personal data.
Avoiding data loss: mumble, mumble something PKI key escrow trusted parties distributed encrypted data. Some form of personal data server as data origin, with re-shares distributed around social infrastructure. It may be a pipe dream, but at the very least it's a different model for considering pervasive data. If the user's Personal Data Stick or Home Server Box is destroyed in fire (or stolen or the cat eats it, or ...), then they and a trusted set of key escrow holders if necessary can reconstruct the data from shards spread amongs some n other systems, no one of which could individually reconstruct the whole.
"Services" in this model would be applications distributed out to operate on the user's own data directly.
Among other implications, the concept of coming up with a common base universal data format seems like a possible outcome. That could still be modified for individual service use, but the transforms would still have to map back to the core.
1. Move processing to data.
2. Use minimum viable data.
E.g., Google (Roberto Bayardo) state that the two critical elements for ad placement are a) current location and b) current search term. Everything else is quite minimally beneficial.
I'm not sure this is viable. I think it's worth tossing into the discussion.