> They are becoming the center of the information universe to their customers. This is not a good thing.
Why isn't it?
Why isn't it?
Then, if the company decides to sell your information, lose it, etc., it's too easy, and you're left empty-handed.
However, I think that if that 1 service makes it possible for you to backup all your information and allows you to remove all the information from their service if you want to, then it shouldn't be a problem... but I might be underplaying their argument...
Something like Google's Data Liberation Front? http://www.dataliberation.org/
I put all my eggs in one basket every time I take the family to the grocery store. It's unclear to me why storing all my information with Google is any worse than piling my wife and kids into the Odyssey.
Google's goals and mine aren't aligned at all, except instrumentally. So Google cares about my privacy up to and until it costs them less to not care than to care.
I'm fully in the Google camp, but let's be honest about the fact that we've made a deal with some supernatural being. We just hope it turns out not to be the devil.
Say you use Google Apps For Domains. Thinking it is safer because you own your own domain. Arguments that you don't really own that domain aside, if google dies, you won't be able to transfer that domain away from google.
Email is the backbone of an approval system for just about everything.
I think you can pretty safely put all your eggs in one basket, as long as you take one egg out, that being your email access. At the very least, forward all inbound emails to some other service so you have access to those in an emergency.
Ideally, we would all have our own mini email servers that we control and manage. However, managing an email server is perhaps one of the harder chunks of tech to manage. From anti-spam to just configuring all the pieces, it is much more than most are willing to do.
Just wanted to balance the “Facebook evil / Google not evil” diatribe, as when discussing these topics only Google is ever mentioned.
Google gives you the email addresses because you provided them with that data, it's yours to begin with. Facebook will give you the email addresses, but only for the users that allowed it to share that data with you.
Will Google give you the email addresses of your Google+ contacts, if they decided not to share their address with you? I doubt it, and rightly so.
“Data Liberation” means that you own your data, not that using some social network gives you the right to be able to communicate with people outside of that service. If you want to contact them outside of Facebook, ask them their email. It's your problem, not Facebook's.
Your argument is like saying that Google should give me my Gmail contacts' phone numbers, so I can contact them without using email.