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My uncle has lost 4 Google accounts. Two to password loss, one to a fire, one to being banned for crimes against currency (having the audacity to live in several countries with different currencies)

The issue isn't the phone, it's that a __government__ is depending on an unregulated private enterprise.

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> one to being banned for crimes against currency (having the audacity to live in several countries with different currencies)

What does this "crimes against currency" mean? I live in several countries at once with different currencies, and I never had a problem with this. And top of this, I travel a lot. I have accounts in 5 countries, in 6 currencies. Should I pay attention to something?

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I think the point is rather what percentage of people will continue to need to have a phone that is Apple or Google, due to death by a million decisions like these.
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Well the comment above was expressing disbelief that more people are not up in arms about this.

When you realize the tiny tiny percentage of people that have a phone that is not apple or google, you understand why few people are up in arms.

It simply doesn’t affect many people.

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This feels like arguing that people wouldn't object to having a shock collar padlocked around their neck because it's not currently shocking them. You don't have to see very many moves ahead to guess what happens if you don't object.

Whereas if the collar is touted as fashionable and the lock is hidden until it's engaged, now your problem is not that people don't care, it's that they don't know, which is different.

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I don't think this analogy comes even close to holding water.
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So cementing a dependency on paperclip-optimizing foreign megacorps to intermediate all your purchases and communications doesn't allow them to influence your behavior?
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A dependency on a paperclip optimizing foregin megacorp is not remotely compara le to a "shock collar padlocked around your neck"
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I’m not for one second saying I like it, agree with it, or support it.

I’m just saying there are not many people impacted, so there are not going to be many people making noise.

People are simply too deep in the trenches of day to day to object to things that don’t impact them personally

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Are you saying there's a threshold percentage somewhere below which you're happy to

A: exclude these people from society or force them to switch to big tech, and

B: accept the consequence where a single other country holds access to everyone's identity information for convenience reasons (because it works for the 99% that are too tech-illiterate to install software that they control instead of the other way around)

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