I’m guessing by now you’ve seen this article, if not it is worth reading. If you’re feeling lazy (nothing against that), it covers a story of a father who took a picture of his son’s genitals for a doctor to diagnose a rash on his android phone. Google flagged it as CSAM and disabled his account. Unfortunately for this father, than meant losing access to his email, photos of his child, and his phone number since he used google fi. That meant he also lost access to many accounts that sent verifications to his email and/or phone number. He tried disputing, was investigated (and cleared) by law enforcement, and google is standing by their decision.
So why talk about this? Well, it points out the power we hand over to tech giants when we trust all of our stuff in them and the amount of recourse we have when something goes wrong. Do you really own your pictures, emails, contacts, information, etc when you hand it over to a company like google? I’d argue that you don’t, or this father would have had almost no trouble getting his account back. Instead, he’s left with the option of getting his data from the law enforcement that investigated him.
What’s the solution to this? Stop using google? Well, it isn’t going to help to stop using google if you have to put all your trust in another company that can do the same. A better option would be to start using your own stuff. Get a domain. You can use the domain for email, and then if your email provider decided to close your account, you could point the domain at a different provider and still get future emails. A domain can also let you run some of your own web services. Maybe consider a service like Nextcloud that can automatically backup the photos/videos on your phone, sync your calendar and contacts, and take notes. You can self host that or stand up an instance on a VPS somewhere. The point is, you’re going to have a lot more control over your data that way.
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