The Need For a Digital Liberty Era

We all know that technology has become an integral part of our daily lives, yet, from time to time, something happens that triggers my eyebrows to raise in suspicion.

I want to share with you what happened to me two days ago.

Note: I love having a wide range of tools in my arsenal to offer to my clients and business partners.

Driven by the sacred flame of experimentation with different cloud solutions, I was browsing various cloud services when one caught my attention for some innovation in VM-Cloud technology. I decided to create an account on their platform and directly start some testing.

Except, my account was immediately locked. No reason was given, just an immediate lock.

Frustrated and disappointed, I opened a ticket for support on their helpdesk, and here is their reply:

"We understand the uncertainty created in temporarily preventing activation. Once our team hears back from you, we will perform an in-depth manual review of your signup information to confirm we're able to provide you access [redacted] resources within 24 hours.We apologize for the inconvenience, and please understand we do this for the safety of our platform, and for the safety of the broader internet. To help us complete your account activation, can you please briefly describe your project goals for building on [redacted]? And provide a social profile (Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub) that we can use to further verify your online identity? Preventing misuse of our platform is critical to providing cloud infrastructure to customers like you. We appreciate your help in keeping the internet safe. We're asking for these additional pieces of information because there were some inconsistencies surfaced about your signup details."

Now, I can't say I wasn't impressed by this pearl in doublespeaking, but certainly, this left me speechless and I suddenly felt living inside Orwell's 1984.

Let's see what's wrong from my point of view:

• What kind of inconsistencies can you find in a full name + email address? (Because that is all I've given to create the account)
• Manual in-depth review? Sounds like an investigation to me. Under what kind of authority is that being carried on and exactly for what purpose?
• You ask for my social handles? What about typing my full name on a search engine? I'm not really that difficult to find.
• What constitutes misuse and, perhaps more importantly, who decides that?

While wanting a safe Internet can be -at times- commendable, it is also a vague and generic statement that can be leveraged to push concerning policies, practices, and actions. This raises questions about how these decisions are made, what are the criteria, who decides them and under whose authority, what level of consensus has been reached between "service providers" and "service receivers", and so on.

Safety should be reached without infringing on personal freedom and liberty, and can never be put on top of freedom and liberty themselves.

The need for online identity verification is understandable only in extremely limited and sensitive scenarios, and using a hosting service is certainly not one of them.

Then again, in those extremely rare circumstances where that may be considered acceptable, remember I was asked to provide social profiles like Twitter, LinkedIn, or GitHub to further verify my online presence. What about the platform's accessibility to individuals who do not have a strong online presence?

This incident has brought into focus the need to prioritize freedom and privacy while ensuring safety on digital platforms.

Granted, I simply stopped using their services and can drive hundreds of my clients' websites somewhere else, but it's time for companies to take a proactive approach toward addressing these concerns by being transparent in their activation procedures, communicating clearly with the user base, and ensuring fairness and consistency in their decision-making processes. I'm sure that, with the right approach, it is possible to create a safer digital world that is more inclusive of those who value individual freedom, liberty, and privacy above all.