It sounds like someone at Google (not necessarily a programmer) needs to read "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers:"
> 4. A phone number uniquely identifies an individual
What a bureaucratic nightmare.
https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHO...
- Projects under the `google` GitHub organization is from Google itself (Google for some reason force projects from Google employees to be umbrellaed under their own organization for some reason, even if it's a personal project)
- Google follows their own rules (applies to any "Big Tech" company)
- Google actually cares about correcting mistakes unless they hit the news/social media
- YouTube and Google tries to make the experience for you, the consumer (on YouTube: consumer = creators + viewers), as good as they can
It does seem this repo is “from Google.”
For example, yapf[0] is under the Google Github org but has the disclaimer:
>Note YAPF is not an official Google product (experimental or otherwise), it is just code that happens to be owned by Google.
libphonenumber doesn't have any similar disclaimer and does seem to be an "official" Google product, but it's hard to tell what Google considers official or not.
I don't think that is true. Google employees can have regular personal projects. If you have a "personal" project that is done under the scope of your employment (e.g., you work on YouTube and you wrote a tool to, I dunno, manage Makefiles to help yourself and/or other coworkers, then that would be a "Google project" housed under `google` even though it's not an "official" product).
These lists made sense in 2000-2010 when programmers had the autonomy ( in most corporations ) to decide on what feature to develop and how it should behave.
This hasn't been the case since the industry introduced roles such as product owner.
I've had to implement my fair share of anti patterns that I was fully aware would degrade the experience for the user. At the end of the day, the programmers have been reduced to essentially blue color workers that just do whatever the MBAs decide on.
Papa Smurf will not be pleased to hear about this.
Falsehoods programmers believe?
Perhaps it’s possible you didn’t do enough to explain why you didn’t believe it was the right work to do, or if you did, perhaps there were other factors in play than “user experience.”
Also, uh, “I have to do what my boss says” doesn’t make you a blue collar worker.
I know, I was exaggerating. I thought it was clear from my usage of the word "essentially".
> perhaps there were other factors in play than “user experience.”
Of course there were. There always are - chief among them the profitability, because selling the customer on stuff they didn't need is profitable. Especially if you frame it "right".
But that example is completely unrelated to this case, to very little value in getting deeper into it.
No, but it does make you a non-professional. The distinction between professionals and non-professionals is that members of professions have ethical obligations above and beyond their obligation to their employer.
You will not find lawyers willing to perjure themselves, accountants to cook your books, or civil engineers happy to sign off on deadly designs.
In contrast, software "engineers" are not professionals, we are hired goons and you can easily find a software monkey ready to build whatever atrocity you want for the right price.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cxe9g0el8epo
https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/practice/general-practice/ac...
You will struggle to find any similar news stories for "software engineer jailed for implementing dark patterns"
And probably because that's not illegal.
Unintentionally revealing comment here. Software goons have no concept of professional ethics and will do any terrible thing you pay them to do.
I'm going to stop here because this is just an exercise in silly faux ignorance on your part.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tesco-fraud...
“The three defendants who are on trial in this case are not the foot soldiers who misconducted themselves. The defendants in this case are the generals – those who are in positions of trust, and who were paid huge compensation packages in order to safeguard the financial health of Tesco.
“These defendants encouraged the manipulation of profits and indeed pressurised others working under their control to misconduct themselves in such a way that the stock market was ultimately misled.”"
> [...] ethical obligations above and beyond their obligation to their employer. You will not find lawyers willing [on behalf of their employer] to perjure themselves [...]
but based on their response to your the examples, :shrug:.
[Many/most ethical] accountants [who are not committing malpractice] will tell their employer, "no, I can't sign off on those fraudulent financial statements," but software developers [as a community, I'm sure someone will pop up with one colorful example] will not tell their employer, "No, I won't run fake bots on the site to inflate our user numbers," or "No, I won't implement this browser fingerprinting to violate our users' privacy."
The sibling commenter seems to be willfully misreading this as "all lawyers are ethical"
edit: i gotta change my first guess that it will be modified soon. google does not set the goal to not be evil, so they'll likely just leave the repo as-is, unattended.
quote: 1. An individual has a phone number
Some people do not own phones, or do not wish to provide you with their telephone number when asked. Do not require a user to provide a phone number unless it is essential, and whenever possible try to provide a fallback to accommodate these users.
2040: 4 hour ago your body separated from your phone, drink a verification can
Maybe the process isn't that great after all.
Individual workers and even entire teams don't matter. They are just another cog in a massive machine. Customer service representatives are forced to follow a script, and they are technically unable to deviate from it. After all, if there's an override button, it just takes one of your tens of thousands of minimum-wage workers to go rogue to end up with a massive compromise.
To fix it you need your manager's manager's manager to file a change request, which will be put on an endless backlog to be potentially looked at by two dozen teams a few years from now. And if it's not a frequently-occurring issue, it's not worth the effort. Google isn't going to fix it because as an organization they aren't even aware you exist. You are collateral damage, and they are totally fine with that.
The only way around this is to shortcut the entire process. Post on HN and hope some manager high enough in the policy/tech chain can be bothered to personally agenda the issue.
Which reminds me that someone claimed that the income/amount of tax paid is the most private data American citizens have (the context was the DOGE/payments stuff), meanwhile every Swedish residents income is very public information.
Negotiating your salary is a whole other ballgame when you know your colleagues salary and your boss knows that you know :)
You couldn't do a phone->name or address->name lookup
>
> > 4. A phone number uniquely identifies an individual
The whiteboard algorithmic interview didn’t prepare nor test for this.
>> 4. A phone number uniquely identifies an individual
But that has nothing to do with this. The idea here is that whoever is paying the phone bill is the same person who uses the phone. Nobody believes that.
Phone/Gas/Electricity/Internet/Cable etc bills can be paid through any of the hundred-odd mobile wallet apps. Other than some exceptional cases, none of them require access to the linked phone number.
At least SMS is easy to divert that way. Think about the services that verify over Whatsapp or Telegram. Good luck finding someone who cares there.
Validating an account with a phone number constitutes phone use so, yes, Google and Youtube have shown an instance of belief that the person paying is the same as the person who uses.
I don’t bother to update the names on their lines, so they all probably link back to me.
Family plans are pretty common here, so I wouldn’t expect too much friction.
I would absolutely cooperate (obviously through a lawyer) with records if someone else on my family plan did something illegal.
I also have records showing that they pay me for the line.
Also yes, it would be a huge hassle. The probability of that happening is small, and I’m willing to risk it like many other things in life. I only do this for very trusted people.
>> It wasn't even that long ago that mobile phones didn't exist, and it was common for an entire household to share one fixed-line telephone number. In some parts of the world, this is still true, and relatives (or even friends) share a single phone number. Many phone services (especially for businesses) allow multiple inbound calls to or outbound calls from the same phone number.
----
¹ https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHO...
This should be a hint that you've misdiagnosed the problem... shouldn't it?
Having his phone bill paid by his mom makes it his mom's phone number by default; it's then shared with him, making it a non-unique identifier. That's why it falls into Falsehood #4 (and likely into Falsehood #3, assuming that his mom has a separate phone number that she doesn't share with anyone else).
No, it makes his mom the account owner. Just because I pay the bill for mine and my wife’s phones doesn’t mean her number is actually my number. Imagine operating a company and the CEO isn’t the one paying the phone bill, it’s the accountant, and you claimed that it’s not the CEO’s phone number, it’s actually the accountant’s, but it’s shared with the CEO. It’s nonsensical. The number is assigned to a person on the account which has nothing to do with who pays the bill.
Which makes the phone numbers under her account hers.
> Just because I pay the bill for mine and my wife’s phones doesn’t mean her number is actually my number.
It absolutely does mean that her number is actually your number. That you choose to share it with her doesn't change that; you can revoke that sharing at any time, or even cancel the line entirely.
(And of course, if both of you jointly own the account, then the numbers therein would simultaneously belong to both of you.)
> Imagine operating a company and the CEO isn’t the one paying the phone bill, it’s the accountant, and you claimed that it’s not the CEO’s phone number, it’s actually the accountant’s, but it’s shared with the CEO.
Is the phone bill under the accountant's name and paid from the accountant's personal bank account in this hypothetical? Or is it under her employer's name, and paid from her employer's bank account? The answer to that question determines the owner of the CEO's phone number, and in neither case is the CEO himself personally the owner of that number.
> The number is assigned to a person on the account which has nothing to do with who pays the bill.
And if that assigned person was the son then it would've been the son's name that Google pulled instead of his mother's, and Google's ignorance of its own advice would've gone unnoticed.
My understanding and assumptions are evidently no worse than yours.
> account owners are different than account payers are different than account assignees
For residential/personal phone plans, they are not. In my T-Mobile account there is exactly one person who can be designated as the owner, payer, and assignee for all of the lines on my account, that person being me. I can at most change the label on a given line, but that label can be literally anything.
> Google is tying to account payers, not assignees.
There is no notion of an "assignee" from any perspective that Google can see. There is only the account payer, which is one and the same with the account owner.
(If the payer is not the owner, then that's called fraud and is a crime in most countries.)
> This is clearly incorrect to everyone else in this comment section.
And it's also clearly incorrect by Google's own guidelines as quoted above. That's the entirety of my point.
We're obviously not going to change each other's minds, so this is probably the point where we should agree to disagree and move on. Last word's yours.
The UK treats "utility bills" as proof of address. Yes, these are trivially forgeable and often incorrect. Yes, it's a big pain that you don't exist if you're not paying bills.
Spent the last few months trying to explain to a randomly changing E.ON representative how unacceptable it was for them to send bills with my name on it to a non-existent address.
I moved out of the country in 2018.
They've offered me £10 credit. That I can't use, because I left the country.
I need to gather all the emails together and send them to the ombudsman, but there's around 80 emails now.
The US even tries to make its overseas nationals pay tax. As a result, everyone everywhere in the world who wants to get paid by Amazon has to sign a US tax form saying they're not a US taxpayer.
The answer is goodwill and doing the right thing.
I mean, I guess you could do something with the DKIM signature, but good luck getting non-technical people to forward a mail in a way which leaves that intact. Realistically the best you're getting is a butchered screenshot.
Your manager / PM: "Make this change, it's how Google is doing things now."
Yet it's so obviously wrong, but if you push back.. not good for you.
I'm almost inclined to think maybe the process/tech isn't designed to do this and there's a bug, or somebody tasked with a manual verification made an outright mistake, or something else went off the rails. Any number of this could have gone wrong.
Then I think of the number of sites and services that have started asking for phone numbers, as if they believe doing it over and over will somehow change the nature of telephony--it would probably be a mistake for me to give Google or any of these other companies the benefit of the doubt.
Same with social security numbers. You don't get it unless I expect you to send me a tax-related form at tax time.
That said, I fully agree with you. I see little reason that buying, for example, a video game online needs my billing information more than walking into a store and buying it there, possibly with the same card.
This just reminded me of a quote: "If cash were invented today, it would be illegal." I forget who (first) said it, but it rings true.
In your latter example, a nexus clearly exists between the business selling you a video game and the state, so sales tax collection is patently obvious.
When you buy online, they have to ask - it’s the only way to figure out the proper jurisdiction.
This is insurance against fraud where the card number is stolen and goods are ordered to a location other than the cardholder address. Which the merchant doesn't want to be liable for. So most places will only ship high value goods (sometimes any goods) to the cardholder address.
The real security is now "enhanced verification", i.e. some sort of second factor and/or password in addition to the card. But this is much more annoying to use.
pjc is correct, this does provide real security; i.e. I cannot steal your card details and use them to order valuable goods sent to my address.
Like it really isn't that rare to have issues where people tell you "nothing can be done, it's from outside of our country" or similar. And then you travel and realize, it's a "your country" issue and many or even most other countries have fixed it or at least massively reduced it and the whole "criminals are in another country" thing didn't prevent them from fixing it...
This e.g. is the case for US spam/scam/robo calls (which isn't "fully fixed" anywhere but starkly reduced by in many places including e.g. the EU).
Which companies are making money off frauds like pig butchering scams? I think you're overestimating how competent the state is and underestimating how hard it is to solve problems like these. For instance, we can barely dissuade other countries from buying Iranian and Russian oil, and there's pretty much bipartisan consensus on that.
Companies that own dating apps.
> I think you're overestimating how competent the state is
I fully agree. The U.S. state is quite incompetent.
> and underestimating how hard it is to solve problems like these
"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"
Have you thought of blocking countries that permit malicious activity to cross international borders? Have you thought of blocking their IP addresses?
Or is that international money just too good to let a "little bit" of malicious activity befall upon your fellow citizens?
And they're lobbying against which regulations that would stop them?
>Have you thought of blocking countries that permit malicious activity to cross international borders? Have you thought of blocking their IP addresses?
The financial system is far more centralized than the internet and at least theoretically has KYC, but US sanctions against enemy states, terrorist groups, and drug gangs are as airtight as a sieve. What makes you so sure that IP blocking countries will have any effect, when anyone can buy a no-log VPN for $5/month?
because it did work in the EU as one example
(that is, if complemented with other things I would have to look up. E.g. a lot of phone fraud is illegal in the country it comes from too, which opens up many possibilities for cross country cooperations (or pressure) to shut them down you)
Mainly you have to
- not thinking in absolutes, rarely can a problem be perfectly 100% be removed, but that doesn't matter making something much better is already a huge step forward.
- identifying likely path to improve things, and then trying it
- if it fails, give it a proper fact based analysis so that future tries can learn from it instead of just saying "see can't be solved"
But what I see a lot is:
- solutions having shown to cause improvements aren't tried "because they aren't airtight/perfect"
- no proper analysis is done, instead of looking what works people look what "feels like it could work"
- a single solutions is very half assed/incompletely tried and after it predictably fails people argue "see nothing can be done so let's not even try" instead of actually analyzing why it failed
> I think that is mostly because the perpetrators are often in a different country than victims.
So, your comment here is moving the goalpost:
> What makes you so sure that IP blocking countries will have any effect, when anyone can buy a no-log VPN for $5/month?
If it's malicious activity behind VPNs in foreign countries, then see previous comment about blocking foreign countries. Block foreign countries at the interconnect until they enact and enforce laws which address the malicious activity.
If it's malicious activity behind VPNs in your own country then you need only convince your law enforcement to enforce existing computer crime laws. Renting a server for $5/mo requires payment and payment provides a name & address to prosecute. All you need is to demonstrate that the malicious activity originated from the rented IP address and during the rental period.
There's no point in implementing measures that would be trivially bypassed but cause great economic and societal harm in the process (ie. creating some sort of KYC regime for the internet, or causing millions to be cut off from the internet). China, arguably one of the most draconian states out there, and the home of pig butchering scams can barely keep a lid on it. Countries like the US that emphasize civil liberties and free trade don't stand a chance.
>If it's malicious activity behind VPNs in your own country then you need only convince your law enforcement to enforce existing computer crime laws. Renting a server for $5/mo requires payment and payment provides a name & address to prosecute.
You can pay for no-log VPNs using crypto or anonymous gift cards. Apple, Google, and others even have 2-hop VPNs that theoretically make it impossible for the provider to log connections even if they wanted to. Not to mention, there are many countries, including the US where you can get prepaid SIMs without presenting any sort of ID and pay with cash. Even if you were some how able to enforce an airtight KYC regime for the internet (doubtful, given how well that works for the financial system), you still have to contend with compromised routers/IOT devices and shady apps that act as proxies for bad guys.
yes, but it's surprisingly cheap (if you now where to ask for it and your operation is large enough)
could have changed a bit after FTC started pushing a bit more against robocalls and for caller verification idk. a year ago??
In most other cases i just type some random numbers or use a number generator. SSN is a weird concept that thankfully doesn’t exist in my country.
But yea unless this is a very important service you get 0 of my real data.
I am pretty sure you have something similar in your country.
Not that it matters on the context of giving away information
I would say a SSN getting leaked is as bad as a passport number getting leaked.
Yes, some legitimate user can't sign up. Depends on what business you are in, and how much budget you put into spam/abuse prevention, this may or may not make sense.
Not like there's any chance of that happening in the DOGE era, of course.
What happened in these 10 years?
How seriously is this enforced varies, Twitch insta bans you for saying things to the effect of "I'm twelve years old"
You don't need a credit card to register a Google account.
As for the phone number, IIRC you do need to provide one during the registration but that number isn't automatically associated with your account, it's there more to prevent spamming I think. Also you can re-use the same number (to certain degree, at least; I have 4 accounts registered with the same number).
Please note that I'm not saying this is ideal, but compared to some other "major" services, Google is actually on the easier side for registering an account.
In their infinite wisdom, Maps decided it'd be best to merge my listing with the listing for the building it's in - but also gave me admin rights over the entire building's listing.
Support refused to fathom that I don't want to have any degree of Maps authority over something that does not belong to me (though I could have definitely used this to my advantage for increasing bookings), and their instructions to unsplit/remove myself never worked.
Google maps hijacking has become a huge issue in my country where scammers update the contact details of local businesses without their knowledge and then scam unsuspecting people calling to place orders or book a stay. The vast majority of business owners don't even know they can / should take ownership of their maps listing.
Ummm, got any more details on where I can find that server?
I only managed to get it fixed because I happened to know someone who worked at Google.
I would never trust Google with anything even vaguely important. If something goes wrong, it will be wrong forever.
This results in people getting a new mobile subscription with a number that can not be used to create a new Google account (this number has been used too many times), or e.g. get the Whatsapp account from the previous owner (as you recover the account by a text to the number)
Since the advent of cell phones and free long distance, people tend to keep a single number for longer, but there used to be a trope about getting wrong number calls for someone who had died and had his number recycled.
What is the appetite for self-hosting streams? I've worked at a variety of ISP gigs and really don't think the bandwidth cost is that crazy of a blocker. But would any streamers ever WANT to self-host something? I feel like people would love to throw off the shackles of YouTube and Twitch, but are probably less enthused about not having their channel advertised to the platform's users. Things like maintaining your own Stripe account also sucks.
(My angle is charging for software to do this, not making another hosted service. Just don't think there is actually a market. Complaining on Reddit when the bureaucracy of Twitch/YouTube stymies you seems to be 100% effective. But will it always be?)
They have to know his legal name, because they are paying him. His core issue is around monetization, caused by the personal info screw up. The "Know Your Customer" laws are a nightmare and are the root of a lot of this kind of horrible bureaucracy.
Anonymousity of the end recipient can't work in the traditional money transfer model
I get the impression that's basically it. You've got to go where the audience is. Even Hololive who are big enough to have their own platform haven't attempted to do this. Bureaucracy aside, youtube is also pretty reliable at global scale.
Problems are:
- discoverability is non existing, e.g. being somtimes on the frontpage of twitch does make a difference in how much you earn (through highly varying depending on how niche your content is), similar raids or even the neglected "viewers which watch this stream also watch" corner do help.
- Platform switching cost, a lot of users don't want to use other platforms then what they are already using. Most streamers have discovered that switching platforms will not carry over most users.
- Cross Platform cost, toady a ton of people want things in a app.
- payment systems, paying on twitch for a sub is one thing, but one some random website .. eh. Same but worst for bits, supper chats. With YT/Twitch people have their payment system potentially already setup. So it's just one click. On your website they don't and and might not want to.
- net neutrality not being a thing everywhere cost, i.e. you don't have to pay for bandwidth only once, but many times, including in places you don't even know you have to with consequences being subtle like some viewers streams always struggling etc. Which effectively will cost you viewers and with that money.
- live cross encoding cost, is also easy to underestimate
- software maintenance cost, especially if you aren't a system admin/software engineer this is huge
- reliability cost, if your stream is down to often it will make people leave
if you "just delete" it and don't allow any effective way for suing the people which uploaded it then it's just a matter of time until you will get sued and held responsible for it
You can at least be assured the letter reader will be literate.
And might even get good support for wherever it ends up because it will be forwarded from the legal department.
This was a bank. Basically an extension of patio11’s advice to contact shareholder relations.
Governments should figure out a way to allow regular people to sue giants without going bankrupt.
Don't do this.
We might wish for every customer to muster infinite patience no matter how poorly treated, but when a company behaves as unreasonably as described in this story about YouTube, it's not solely the fault of the customer finally losing their shit when "front desk" turns into "front line".
"Hire armed guards to protect the company from its own customers" is a wonderfully apt summary of the modern tech approach to customer service.
I'm a customer of google. I pay them money. I would never, EVER recommend that people front into the Mountain View, or any other google office worldwide to discuss their issues. Never.
Google is a bit of a shit company when it comes to customer service, but suggesting you can front into their space to get it addressed is really not ok.
The problem is the lack of a real service you really can approach. Not, that they wind up needing rent-a-cop in the lobby.
If people casually recommend simply visiting the campus of Apple, Meta, Google to get customer disputes settled, then its a low bar prediction it's going to get bad.
Nobody really wants to call the security/police on a random guy, especially if he is not a complete weirdo.
How is Google or YT able to determine the subscriber behind a phone number? Caller ID lookup?
The other aspect would be if Google were able to cross-reference address book contacts that were obtained from permissions from their apps/services to check what name is most commonly associated with that number.
I loved looking up number owners as a teen. I don't know why. It was right there on the monopoly telco's website.
I ended up being on a bunch of conference calls during COVID, and from what I recall, there was a roughly (it varied significantly between calls) even split between:
* caller ID shows the correct name (but maybe misspelled, though misspellings were more common when the host tried to add/correct information from one of the other types)
* caller ID shows the name of a spouse/parent/sibling (one notable example: husband and wife both joined the call separately, both with the husband's name, but one including the middle initial)
* caller ID shows the name of somebody vaguely involved with the actual person for some reason
* caller ID just shows something generic, like a brand or "wireless caller"
* caller ID fails so just a number
Maybe 1% of users used the app and so didn't have an associated phone number, just a username/email. At some point I was surprised to discover that video calls were in fact supported.
I tried to upload some vids, gv asks for submiting paperwork to prove my real identity.
Shit product designed by lawyers.
Google account: everyone knows what it is, your personal account. Unless you have GSuite, then nobody knows what it's meant to be and let you do.
YouTube account (channel): there is now a many-to-many relation between Google accounts and YouTube accounts, but they otherwise function pretty much like pre-Google+ YouTube accounts. You can even change the primary Google account of a YouTube account, that requires clicking a button and waiting for a week. Then there is this brand vs non-brand distinction, where you can convert from non-brand to brand, but not the other way around, and some stuff used to work only with one of these types. And I think nowadays there is some way to make a Google account without a (named) YouTube channel, if you're just a viewer that doesn't even comment or create playlists, but there is not much reason to do that.
AdSense account: A billing account, once again with many-to-many mapping to Google accounts, and also many-to-many [0] mapping to AdSense projects ("sites"). Requires unique billing details, and apparently unique address as well [1], but otherwise shouldn't do much.
So in the linked situation, I think editing Google account login info changed the AdSense account details, which is definitely unexpected. YouTube account was probably not the problem here, I suspect the author would have had same issue if they were selling ads on a website instead of YouTube channel, though of course you have to use different AdSense UI if you sell ads on Youtube vs on the web, which probably further complicates things.
Anyway, since it hit the frontpage of ~~Google's only working support channel~~ HackerNews, it will soon be solved (for that single creator only, probably).
The only good solutions to this mess seem to be to either make YouTube account a standalone thing (cutting AdSense from the picture, and using Google accounts only for authentication), or to decouple all the accounts and make links between them more configurable / clear. Anything in-between, and we get (waves hands) this.
But both of these solutions would also make it too clear where to cut if/when the Google antitrust process comes, which doesn't make me think it will happen anytime soon.
[0] https://support.google.com/adsense/thread/11680365/how-we-ca...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/PartneredYoutube/comments/17vb8w8/c...
Also Google Fi and Google Voice..
I know that companies (especially in the US) tend to stuff everything they can think of in the ToS or EULA but generally European courts seem to hold the opinion that they're not allowed to contain "surprising" clauses and it's generally not possible to waive your rights (e.g. you can't waive your copyright but you can grant a license functionally equivalent to putting a work in the public domain in the US). I suspect UK courts may still rule similarly with regard to data ownership.
I don’t think I had any issues because of it, but it’s really infuriating that the default is of course “Agree to give my data to everyone for all purposes”.
Setting name was:
> With your authorization, Verizon provides certain account, device, and profile data related to your Verizon account to third parties for the purpose of helping companies you do business with verify your identity and help protect you against identity theft and account takeover.
If you use Verizon, setting is here:
https://www.verizon.com/digital/nsa/secure/ui/acct/profile/p...
The ones I’m aware of stream primarily on Twitch with YT for clips.
If only one company exists that can pay people to perform your role, and that company capriciously locked random employees out of all systems over a misunderstanding, and it's seemingly impossible to start up a competitor or find any other way to get paid doing it... maybe find another job?
I think "streamer" is one of those cases where it's least true.
> The action isn't "quit preemptively", the action is finding another job now, instead of making some other investment you would With your time today.
The action is finding an entirely different career which is a lot more obnoxious than finding another job normally is.
Sometimes risk is less bad than the alternatives.
It’s a shame torrenting never became mainstream for legitimate content. Commenting and community engagement can be distributed or federated like Lemmy or mastodon and “primary content” to be distributed/streamed via P2P.
Successful content creators can ultimately pay for VPS to help distribute/seed. And upstarts can share their content on their residential connection.
In terms of discoverability their websites were better than the streamers of today - and we're going back 20+ years here. There's a strong argument to be made that price is only a small part in why people opt for piracy. The UI/UX is better, the support is better, even the situation around privacy is better provided you're going somewhere legit.
Honestly it takes quite some cognitive dissonance to say that Apple's or Microsoft's products are better than Google's.
I've had multiple Microsoft accounts locked out. None of them were originally with Microsoft; they were with companies that were later bought out by Microsoft and then migrated to a Microsoft account. Goodbye Skype, Halo, Minecraft, etc. I won't ever use Office or an Xbox at this point.
And as far as Apple's concerned... well they talk the talk but their declining quality control demonstrates they don't really walk the walk. It doesn't take a genius to see where they're headed in another 10 years.
I decided I wanted to use Visual Studio enough that it was worth creating a Microsoft account for that purpose.
Then, I never did anything with the account other than use Visual Studio.
At some point, a message popped up in Visual Studio saying "the pattern of behavior for your account looks fraudulent, so we're disabling it". Visual Studio still worked fine.
I'm not sure what they were hoping would happen. They forced me to create an account I didn't want and had no use for, and then they shut it down for fraud when I didn't use it. OK?
If that's all it was, then I'd just create throwaway accounts all day long.
But the writing is on the wall. Microsoft wants to associate the software you write with a Microsoft account. It builds "trust" and "legitimacy" when they can "verify" that the software being deployed into the Microsoft store (or elsewhere) was created with a specific developer with an associated Microsoft account. Data mine your git repository and associate your commit metadata (eg; name, email, etc) with other products just as they do already on GitHub. Give you extra benefits (free hosting! remove advertisements! gain extra visibility to recruiters!) if you write software that's popular, and especially if it's only available on Windows; or penalize you (you don't "qualify" for free hosting; it costs $ to remove advertisements from your app; your app has fewer enablements; your LinkedIn profile is less-visible to recruiters; etc) if you write software for other platforms (Linux, macOS, iOS, etc)...
I guess said much simpler: you see the Embrace part by Microsoft's actions. I see the Extend and Extinguish part being enabled by those actions.
But skype nags for microsoft account on every login.
There is no difference in terms of privacy. If that's why you replaced them.
Transparency is a dependency of trust. Neither Google, Apple, nor Microsoft are transparent about the software they offer, the data that software collects, or how they use the data collected. They are in fact quite opaque about all of those things. The only assurance of privacy they offer is their word.
Apple does have the occasional third-party review of cryptography and whatnot.
Apple also have an actual, single phone support number in multiple languages and countries that you can use as a paying customer. Day and night with Google.
Usually when you ask this, people just tell you again why they're right. That means they aren't really open to changing their mind. If I can prove you're wrong, will you change your mind?
"Neither Google, Apple, nor Microsoft are transparent about the software they offer, the data that software collects, or how they use the data collected."
Apple is very different than the other two here. Do you actually believe otherwise or are your goalposts just... set as to be useless?
That's a major component of what transparency entails, and that's what's a dependency of trust. No source code = no transparency, no transparency = no trust. Simple.
Being up in arms about the lack of privacy from Google is fair, and something I agree with. But Apple doesn't offer dramatically more privacy from Apple that I'm aware of. Both allow, but discourage, free accounts, and run ad networks (that they don't sell user information on)
I'm not even arguing there's no difference, just that there's less than everyone likes to pretend
Here’s what to do: stop being a digital serf to google.