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.
Edit: I also have little faith in any legal remedy going far enough. The cat's out of the proverbial bag, too many businesses "depend" on data, and the government certainly enjoys being able to more easily access your data via cloud businesses than having to deal with a different enduser's setup every single time. Not saying we can't make progress, but I'm pessimistic.
And yes, it may not be that common for people to lose their Google account, but that's really just one failure mode of relying on in-app storage. The provider may decide to suddenly put parts of your data behind a paywall (like Slack just did), or may straight up cease to exist. Even if Microsoft were to do something similar to your OneDrive account, you'd still have your local copy and could change your cloud backup provider with very reasonable effort.
Even more people know a couple of people who have devices with some spare space.
Wouldn't it be great if we had a way that people could "join" trusted devices to create mutual background backups. So I could pair my laptop with my phone, and each would back up "essential" data for the other. But I could also pair my phone with my significant other, and our phones would also work as backups of each other. Syncing could be done on some kind of schedule, maybe when they're in bluetooth range, or maybe if they find each other on the same LAN. Or maybe they could use cloud storage to transfer E2E encrypted blobs.
(i.e. my phone would backup my laptop and my parter's phone, my partner's phone would back up my phone, and my laptop would also back up my phone. If my partner wanted/was willing to also back up my laptop, that would be a separate step, and they would back up each other.)
Deciding which data should be considered "essential" is left as an exercise for the implementor :-)
It’s also extremely rare for an average person’s house to burn down. Or extremely rare for a 500 year flood. Or an asteroid hitting the earth. Should we not prepare for, avoid, and mitigate these risks?
It’s not telling people to store flat files in the cloud. It’s encouraging sustainable protocols that decompose to strong flat files in the cloud.
Story time is when ynab originally just write their files to a file structure and used Dropbox to sync. Then they switched to saas, charged people a monthly fee and store customer data in their proprietary cloud. One day ynab will go away and so will their data. Their earlier method will last forever because of the portability of flat files.
Customer lock in makes companies more money.
Maybe they should be able to? I’d purchase that kind of insurance!
Just like I wouldn’t mitigate 500 year flood plain but would instead never buy or build a house there.
You mention laws and thats the core problem and its naive to just rely on them. Corporations are profit-first, bonus-first, and employ progressively more sociopaths as you move up the management hierarchy. This is simple sad fact regardless of industry or country.
Those folks see laws as obstacles, and unfortunately often try to game them. The results are basically all the fines big banks face from regulators, financial crises, endless internet privacy issues and so on. People just gaming well intended rules for their own profit.
plus re laws - we don't have judiciary hegemony over whole Earth. Corporations move their activities to weakest jurisdictions immediately, ie Ireland for taxes from Europe. Or they do pay minimal taxes in US. DOn't expect privacy to be handled better by default.