DER LiNZER

threeoneorg:

Relying on Gmail (and other free mail services) to manage your online identity is perhaps not such a wise idea. More and more people come up with examples on why it is so. Here is another one:

[Google] canceled his account without telling him why. Google took 7 years of correspondence, over 4,800 photographs and videos, his Google Voice phone number and voicemail, all of his saved reading lists, bookmarks, contacts calendars, and more. He lost his online identity. He lost his blog. He lost his ability to be contacted by the outside world during a time that he needed his established methods of communication most. For some of the services he lost he was a paying customer, but Google’s users are never their customers. Google’s customers are advertisers. When you trust your online identity to Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! you are trusting their customers, the advertisers, stay interested in you. I would rather pay for trust, then base my online identity on the profitability of click-through ads.