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Just for reference, stuff like this is exactly why some people oppose the forced Apple/Google requirement in government systems like the new eIDs (eIDAS) in Eur

Just for reference, stuff like this is exactly why some people oppose the forced Apple/Google requirement in government systems like the new eIDs (eIDAS) in Europe. If you're forced to use Apple/Google for digital identification, playing around with your Google account and get it banned can have disproportional consequences. Suddenly you're locked out of all online government systems.

shevy-java 13d ago
It is a very clear act of total betrayal for europan governments to use taxpayers money from Europeans, to invest into US mega-corporations that proxy-enslave Europeans. Lobbyists in Europe are getting rich right now.
- lenerdenator 13d ago
  Who gets the money shouldn't be your focus, it's that there's even talk of anyone building such a system at all that should be the focus. Europe has a long history of government abuses of human rights. There's absolutely no guarantee that such a system being designed and implemented by people in Europe as opposed to the US is a safeguard against any sort of human rights issues.
  - logicchains 13d ago
    What do you mean, you don't think a party named the "Alternative for Deutschland" would make benevolent use of such systems when it gets into power?
    - 293725903 13d ago
      [dead]
    - cindyllm 13d ago
      [dead]
    - megagpt1 13d ago
      [dead]
    - lenerdenator 13d ago
      Ah, yes, AfD. Where you can walk into a meeting, and cut off a guy's speech about five minutes in with this line [0] Seriously though, I'm surprised that there's not a lot more mass resistance to the idea. It's a massive surveillance apparatus. Meanwhile, Flock cameras are getting cut down, shot at, spray painted, or stolen with regularity in the US. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3AegXcu7kA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3AegXcu7kA
      - userbinator 13d ago
        Meanwhile, Flock cameras are getting cut down, shot at, spray painted, or stolen with regularity in the US. For better or worse, there's a sizeable chunk of the US population who still have that "rebel" trait; that and the innate distrust of government and institutions in general is nothing compared to European culture.
giancarlostoro 13d ago
At that point, Google and Apple should be legally barred from fully banning you if it impedes you identifying yourself unless your account is hacked.
- toomuchtodo 13d ago
  Google and Apple should be legally mandated to federate with nation state identity systems. This prevents them from revoking access, as the identity management is within nation state control vs big tech. You potentially have recourse with your government, you have no recourse with Google and Apple (current state). They may consume your identity for your benefit, but they may not control your digital identity. If a Big Tech company chooses to ban you, they should be required to provide you, at their cost, a copy of all of your data stored with them and report that they did so to a regulator. I strongly doubt the US would mandate this, but could see the EU doing so. The technical primitives exist and implementation is straightforward. Without a law, this will not change, there is no incentive for it to change.
  - PontifexMinimus 13d ago
    The way the EU could implement this is to mandate only using identity providers can guarantee they will not revoke people's identities, and the only way to make that guarantee watertight is to mandate only identity providers based within the EU.
    - toomuchtodo 13d ago
      There are no guarantees unfortunately, just contracts (formal and informal) that can be broken and paths as to what happens when those contracts degrade or fail. Agree with you on mandating EU only idps for those who reside within the EU jurisdiction.
  - subscribed 13d ago
    > Google and Apple should be legally mandated to federate with nation state identity systems. With which states? I'm I'm a citizen of two and live in the third, potentially having eSIM of the fourth?
throwaway13337 13d ago
Maybe we should reframe how we see the big gate keepers like Google and Apple as they seem to be a new concept. They are not governments but have properties of them. Governments are defined as having a monopoly on violence. And we, through a lot of struggles, were able to attenuate this power such that this power was not granted to a single person alone but both distributed to the judgement of many and codified so that, in theory, no one is above the law. Even imperfect, this cultural belief that governments should behave as such has caused it to be, in a flawed way, more true than it used to be. These digital gate keepers have special powers that control identity, the algorithms deciding your information awareness, and access to what society now requires to live a normal life. So, what are they? And where is our enlightenment stage? What sorts of human rights are there in this world that we agree on, at least culturally. I don't believe government regulation is the answer - it has both failed and centralizes again in fewer hands. The thing we need is cultural understanding first of this new sort of entity. And an ethics system that we can agree on that can constrain them as the Magna Carta once described. How should our collective values shape this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
- icantevenhold 13d ago
  We should break these companies apart - they should not have that level of power.
  - throwaway13337 13d ago
    Centralization of power at all levels is bad. I therefore agree in spirit. But who is the 'we' in that 'we'? If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests. Making a change requires the shifting of the overtone window of acceptability. At that point, it executes on it own regardless of mechanism. The cultural norms are the prime mover.
    - icantevenhold 13d ago
      We the people
verisimi 13d ago
We already live in fascism - governments and corporations are just wings of the same bird.
exe34 13d ago
It's actually why I will never use any of Google's paid services like compute or LLMs or storage. I will not risk my access to important services. "Free" Gmail and search is all I will use.
- megagpt1 13d ago
  [dead]
megagpt1 13d ago
Which is funny because the government can't legally ban you from the government. If you suffer any consequences from this, the government is at fault in every case. Of course, good luck proving it while you're in jail.
wmf 13d ago
In that case you should be able to create another Google account.
- EmbarrassedHelp 13d ago
  Politicians have been pushing companies to be more aggressive about banning individuals who open new accounts after their previous one gets banned. That was even one of the requirements of the deal in the recent social media court case in the US.
  - megagpt1 13d ago
    What's your evidence politicians are relevant to this?
LorenPechtel 13d ago
And there's the problem that they can do this with no recourse and no defense permitted. I'm reminded of the guy who lost his Google access over "child pornography"--a picture sent to his little boy's pediatrician that got automatically uploaded. The police agreed he had done nothing wrong, Google didn't give him his account back.

shevy-java 13d ago

It is a very clear act of total betrayal for europan governments to use taxpayers money from Europeans, to invest into US mega-corporations that proxy-enslave Europeans. Lobbyists in Europe are getting rich right now.

lenerdenator 13d ago
Who gets the money shouldn't be your focus, it's that there's even talk of anyone building such a system at all that should be the focus. Europe has a long history of government abuses of human rights. There's absolutely no guarantee that such a system being designed and implemented by people in Europe as opposed to the US is a safeguard against any sort of human rights issues.
- logicchains 13d ago
  What do you mean, you don't think a party named the "Alternative for Deutschland" would make benevolent use of such systems when it gets into power?
  - 293725903 13d ago
    [dead]
  - cindyllm 13d ago
    [dead]
  - megagpt1 13d ago
    [dead]
  - lenerdenator 13d ago
    Ah, yes, AfD. Where you can walk into a meeting, and cut off a guy's speech about five minutes in with this line [0] Seriously though, I'm surprised that there's not a lot more mass resistance to the idea. It's a massive surveillance apparatus. Meanwhile, Flock cameras are getting cut down, shot at, spray painted, or stolen with regularity in the US. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3AegXcu7kA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3AegXcu7kA
    - userbinator 13d ago
      Meanwhile, Flock cameras are getting cut down, shot at, spray painted, or stolen with regularity in the US. For better or worse, there's a sizeable chunk of the US population who still have that "rebel" trait; that and the innate distrust of government and institutions in general is nothing compared to European culture.

giancarlostoro 13d ago

At that point, Google and Apple should be legally barred from fully banning you if it impedes you identifying yourself unless your account is hacked.

toomuchtodo 13d ago
Google and Apple should be legally mandated to federate with nation state identity systems. This prevents them from revoking access, as the identity management is within nation state control vs big tech. You potentially have recourse with your government, you have no recourse with Google and Apple (current state). They may consume your identity for your benefit, but they may not control your digital identity. If a Big Tech company chooses to ban you, they should be required to provide you, at their cost, a copy of all of your data stored with them and report that they did so to a regulator. I strongly doubt the US would mandate this, but could see the EU doing so. The technical primitives exist and implementation is straightforward. Without a law, this will not change, there is no incentive for it to change.
- PontifexMinimus 13d ago
  The way the EU could implement this is to mandate only using identity providers can guarantee they will not revoke people's identities, and the only way to make that guarantee watertight is to mandate only identity providers based within the EU.
  - toomuchtodo 13d ago
    There are no guarantees unfortunately, just contracts (formal and informal) that can be broken and paths as to what happens when those contracts degrade or fail. Agree with you on mandating EU only idps for those who reside within the EU jurisdiction.
- subscribed 13d ago
  > Google and Apple should be legally mandated to federate with nation state identity systems. With which states? I'm I'm a citizen of two and live in the third, potentially having eSIM of the fourth?

throwaway13337 13d ago

Maybe we should reframe how we see the big gate keepers like Google and Apple as they seem to be a new concept. They are not governments but have properties of them. Governments are defined as having a monopoly on violence. And we, through a lot of struggles, were able to attenuate this power such that this power was not granted to a single person alone but both distributed to the judgement of many and codified so that, in theory, no one is above the law. Even imperfect, this cultural belief that governments should behave as such has caused it to be, in a flawed way, more true than it used to be. These digital gate keepers have special powers that control identity, the algorithms deciding your information awareness, and access to what society now requires to live a normal life. So, what are they? And where is our enlightenment stage? What sorts of human rights are there in this world that we agree on, at least culturally. I don't believe government regulation is the answer - it has both failed and centralizes again in fewer hands. The thing we need is cultural understanding first of this new sort of entity. And an ethics system that we can agree on that can constrain them as the Magna Carta once described. How should our collective values shape this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

icantevenhold 13d ago
We should break these companies apart - they should not have that level of power.
- throwaway13337 13d ago
  Centralization of power at all levels is bad. I therefore agree in spirit. But who is the 'we' in that 'we'? If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests. Making a change requires the shifting of the overtone window of acceptability. At that point, it executes on it own regardless of mechanism. The cultural norms are the prime mover.
  - icantevenhold 13d ago
    We the people

verisimi 13d ago

We already live in fascism - governments and corporations are just wings of the same bird.

exe34 13d ago

It's actually why I will never use any of Google's paid services like compute or LLMs or storage. I will not risk my access to important services. "Free" Gmail and search is all I will use.

megagpt1 13d ago
[dead]

megagpt1 13d ago

Which is funny because the government can't legally ban you from the government. If you suffer any consequences from this, the government is at fault in every case. Of course, good luck proving it while you're in jail.

wmf 13d ago

In that case you should be able to create another Google account.

EmbarrassedHelp 13d ago
Politicians have been pushing companies to be more aggressive about banning individuals who open new accounts after their previous one gets banned. That was even one of the requirements of the deal in the recent social media court case in the US.
- megagpt1 13d ago
  What's your evidence politicians are relevant to this?

LorenPechtel 13d ago

And there's the problem that they can do this with no recourse and no defense permitted. I'm reminded of the guy who lost his Google access over "child pornography"--a picture sent to his little boy's pediatrician that got automatically uploaded. The police agreed he had done nothing wrong, Google didn't give him his account back.