This is the flipped script for our social contract with Google…they release product, they don’t have any obligation to care about users…dismissing us less loudly than the author, but no less real…

You can pay extortionists to get your data back.

If your phone automatically factory resets, all the money in the world won’t recover your data…sadly worse than ransomware…

from a data loss perspective, sure.

from an extortion perspective i'd rather have my data wiped.

Well, no, ransomware is worse than losing all data on the device, since ransomware gangs generally also destroy your backups and also attempt extortion with threats to publish your data. All backups help against accidental destruction and incidents like in this article, but for ransomware protection most cloud storage solutions won't help you, you need either offline or append-only backups.

Technically yes, but I suspect the ransomware comparison was brought up to paint how malicious it is. Otherwise the better analogy would be dropping your phone from 50ft.

It was actually a wiper.

Well, NotPetya obviously was not ransomware, it was malware that masqueraded to pretend to be ransomware.