Quote Originally Posted by iego View Post
Along with digital censorship, these companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, etc.) are being entrusted with our digital identities. To access content today, you must identify yourself. This board requires a registration process, but that is to protect the board owner. When you register using credentials that are authenticated from sources like google, facebook, Microsoft, twitter, etc. with one click on their end, you can lose access, or be denied access to content, including content saved on your own device.

I'm a pretty heavy user of Microsoft products, both at work and at home, and I am thinking I just have to stop using their stuff and go to an open source option. Sometimes, it takes so long for me to open a Microsoft Office file and go through all the identity checks that are happening in the background, I just don't open it, and forego doing something that I wanted to do.

I know this sounds like bad computing practices, ignoring online safety, etc., but to me it's just scary and potentially nefarious that each and every document, file, etc. is tagged and will or will not open based on the identity provided by these master identity providers, especially when they can choose to censor, and otherwise control a users digital identity, at their own beck and whim.

-John
I understand your concern, especially given the history and practices of the companies in question but identity verification is an absolute must in today's digital world. Federated identity verification is all the more important given recent conduct of the federal bureaucracy (not to mention some of the most abysmal information security practices in the nation). However, there is no reason you can't use a whole other company for identity verification and in fact there's a huge business opportunity (IMO) for a company that is truly concerned about personal privacy to offer these services. Duck Duck Go is doing quite well in the search engine category and would be doing even better if people would wake up to the sheer evil of Google. I wish there was a true Linux phone alternative to Android because I would dearly love to give up that gmail account and any ability for Google to monitor or data dive into my location, calendar, contacts, etc. It's almost enough for me to switch to iOS (not quite but almost).