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Digital Sovereignity - It's Personal

Imagine this: Your Google account gets disabled.

You suddenly discover that your email is no longer working. Your archive of family pictures and videos is gone. Your chromebook turned into an expensive doorstop. Your calendar is gone. Your todo list is gone (though this might be a good thing...)

Even on your laptop: You can't log into all those web sites where you used your Google account. It will take several weeks to find all the things which are now broken for you. All the places you signed up for stuff using that email address will stop working to various degrees:

You can't reset your password if you forget it. You can't "click the verification link" for stuff, because they will send the link to your email which is no longer working. You can't get the site to change your email address without confirming from the old email address, which no longer works. But at least you won't get their "special offers" spam.

You are basically cut off. A large part of your digital life has been amputated.

And there is nothing you can do about it. You are just a single individual. You don't pay for your account with Google or Microsoft (and probably not for Apple either). You have zero leverage. Nowhere to complain to.

Neither company has a help desk where you can talk to a person. Even if you can: How do they know you are not a hacker trying to impersonate you? You can't even prove to their satisfaction that you are you ! (if this was easy: You should worry about getting hacked instead!)

This imaginary scenario was for Google, but you will experience similar things if your Microsoft account was blocked, or if your Apple account was blocked.

What Went Wrong ?

The underlying problem is that you depended on it. A lot. And it was free!

Initially: you probably only used it for a few things. But it was so easy to use, you ended up using it in many places. Everbody else where using it too. It's nice to have everything in one place; you don't want to be juggling 5 email accounts with different passwords and trying to remember which account you used for signing up for what. And you didn't want to bother with all the "tech" stuff. Nobody does. So you naturally gravitated towards a "central" account.

Over time: You depended on it more and more.

Yes: Those adverts were annoying, but at least it was free, right?

Well. Turns out: It's not actually free. The trade-off you made (probably without thinking about it) was that you surrendered control for ease of use. Control didn't seem to be something to worry about.

And when things went wrong you ended up in a position where you could not do anything about it.

Obviously, this is not a scenario you want to be in. But it does not feel like you did anything wrong to end up there. You just did the same as lots of other people. You followed the crowd, and usually you can trust the crowd to not end up in unsafe places.

But What Can I Do?

Hopefully you are not already in the scary scenario outlined above.

And it might not happen to you. But can you be sure?

We all make use of various "free" services; they are quite useful after all. So I am not advocating that you abandon Google /Microsoft /Apple /Whatever completely (although might want to for other reasons...).

The use of such services is not a problem. But the dependency on such services can be a problem. So the key point is to eliminate (or reduce) your dependency on any single service. Don't put all your eggs in the one basket - even it is an attractive basket.

It probably means changing the way you work with these things. But it won't be that difficult - you just have to think a little more.

Multiple Independent Services

Use multiple (independent) services for different things. In that way: if one "breaks", the impact is limited to what you used that service for. It might still be bad, but at least it won't be as bad as the worst-case scenario.

For example: For email: Have both a GMail account and a Microsoft Account. You may be able to get away with e.g. 2 independent GMail accounts if you trust Google not to somehow link the two accounts together (it's easy for them if you use them from the same browser...)

You will have to deal with separate passwords for separate services (because you should not use the same password everywhere)

Many services (e.g. GitHub) will allow multiple email addresses to be associated with the same account. Make use of that: If you lose access to one email account, you can still use other email accounts, and thus won't lose access to GitHub just because your email is one. (Beware that this does not guard against GitHub cancelling your account).

Pay For Services

If you are a paying customer for a service then you are likely to have some leverage with the provider if it breaks. They may even have an actual person (in your own country!) answering the phone.

Take Control Yourself

You can host things yourself. This is more suitable for the more technically inclined.

Pros: This can make you completely independent of providers.

Cons: If things break, you're the one who has to put things back together again. You have to deal with regular updates, hardware failures, backups and security yourself.

As I'm technically inclined, this is what I opted for; making the services available to friends and family.

Make Backups

If you would lose data if you lose access to a service: That means you did not have backups. You probably should.

So you should take backups. Get a couple of USB-attached hard drives and back up the data to there. Regularly.