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Absolutely. The current level of service these companies provide is functionally identical to what would have existed 25 years ago. Losing your Apple account would have been a minor annoyance - the relationship involved trivial amounts of money, and wasn’t deeply integrated into anyone’s lives. Even if you lost an email address, losing access to it wouldn’t have locked you out of hundreds of important accounts, and any important accounts would probably be easily updated to a new address with a phone call, and likewise for a few friends. If you got fully locked out forever, it really wasn’t important.

So, we now have the same “who cares, it’s just some dumb online account” level of service with much more critical accounts. Because big tech has scaled users to the 9-10 figure range, while not investing almost anything in customer service. Instead of having thousands of CSRs like the phone company, tech employs a few disempowered call center operators overseas, whose only job is to read FAQ answers at callers and ask them to try restarting their computers.

To say nothing of weaponized account locking.

I shudder to think how vulnerable the current system would be to intentional denial of identity via other parties tripping fraud systems on an account.

Say, while the target was traveling?

> There apparently is no way to cleanly divide purchases in a Divorce or separation, even if the person was fleeing an abusive situation

Believe it or not, google is even more stunningly incompetent than that.

If you have someone in your contacts there literally is no way to (1) retain him/her, and (2) ensure they are never, ever, for any reason, suggested in any product. eg in google docs, I do not want "@" autocompletions to suggest the person. No sharing, no drive sharing, no email cc/bcc, etc.

In my case, there was a breakup with a cofounder / exit from a company and ongoing collaboration with a friend who shared the same first name. I actually had to delete the former cofounder's contact, which made me miss some calls from an unknown number.

Having someone that you need to occasionally maintain contact with that should never be prompted in any way (exes of all types, divorced, stalker) is a basic need in real-world systems.

To put this as plainly as I possibly can:

1. It is objectively true that Apple and Google accounts are extremely important to many people.

2. It is also objectively true that most users will only need one of each, a few at most. Fraudsters have no such limitations, and may want to create thousands of them per day if the possibility arises.

3. Therefore, it's likely that a significant percentage of all accounts ever created are fraudulent, even if the actual number of fraudsters is much lower. This is the crucial observation many people miss in this debate.

4. Real users do not want constant iMessage spam and other problems resulting from fraudulent accounts remaining open. Therefore, normal users care deeply about fraudulent accounts being closed promptly (and so do money-laundering regulators, but that's another discussion).

5. Normal users also care about their accounts remaining open. Apple has to balance these two problems.

6. If we force Apple (by regulation, PR crisis or any other method) to be softer on closures, the only way to do that without exacerbating #4 is to make opening fraudulent accounts harder.

7. The only reliable way of preventing fraudsters from opening accounts is strict and invasive identity verification.

8. Therefore, if we're asking Apple / Google to keep more accounts open, we're also asking for more surveillance.

This may actually be the right tradeoff to make, but it is important to point out that there is a tradeoff here, and that no decision in this regard goes without consequences.

charge 5$ for the ability to send your first iMessage. problem solved.

So now every fraudster with $5 appears legitimate?

Remember blue check marks? The EU is not happy about those.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...

They would appear no less legitimate then now?

When has the EU been happy about anything, ever?

"On X, anyone can pay to obtain the ‘verified' status without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account, making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with."

As stated in you source the EU is (among other things) not happy about Twitter calling users 'verified' while the meaning of 'verified' switched from "we did sth. to make sure the account owner is indeed the thing/person they say they are" to "the account owner is paying a monthly fee".

Now Apple has a financial incentive to let more fraudsters in. Great job.

None of this prevents them from providing proper customer service that can resolve cases of false positives.

It is kind of astonishing to me that the entire chain of logic was put together without "The company could invest in better customer service to resolve disputed identity" as a third possibility.

It was certainly my first priority for an e-mail provider when I started to de-Google my life.

My reading is that this was included in point #7, i.e. access to the customer service is conditional on identity verification.

Why cant they give a task which is reasonable for a real customer, e.g. show up with ID in an apple store and lets us reserve $100 on your credit card to unlock an account which is under investigation immediately? This is not more surveillance - Apple already knows the real name of their customer.

Or we could, you know, restructure our economy so that we don't have huge semi-monopolies anymore. I know, not going to happen, but one can dream.

And then we would have health insurance and health care level problems with lots of things.

I’m realizing maybe I should just use Amazon or iCloud AND Google Photos for backing up my images. My whole life is in Google Photos. I could lose it from something stupid and never even have a person to contact about that.

Shutterfly will upload all your photos and store them for free if you buy a few magnets on sale now and then. Works from iPhone well enough and it's my "third backup."

Shutterfly will also continually spam you despite clicking the unsubscribe button multiple times.

At least do a google takeout backup. I believe there are ways to import that into software like immich (a self hosted alternative)

Set up a NAS and use a self-hosted equivalent like Immich. Then you aren't dependent on anyone.

Immich. https://immich.app/

They have their issues, but they are actively working on it.

It's good you're realising it now, before you lose the lot as has happened to others.

Apple have a solution. Have separate accounts and buy everything twice.

iCloud is overrated, it was not encrypted at rest for ages. I much prefer using Time Machine and keeping the passcodes in a PW manager, and maybe a safe deposit box as a backup.

iCloud is a whole lot of things. What you describe is a backup storage solution. Time Machine does not handle: - photo sync between devices and users - shared storage between devices and users (no, not backup, but actual directories and files etc) - private relay - state sync for games and other apps - etc etc