Digital Oligarchs Continue to Hit the Little Guy

Nice to see that the digital oligarchs are hitting the little guys… as if Google, LogMeIn, Amazon et al aren’t making enough money from their corporate customers. I find this exploitation even more obscene in the current pandemic as we are all having to increasingly rely on digital resources to continue our personal, business, education and leisure activities. Expect more of the same from other major digital players over the coming years but here are two of the “starter-for-10” coming up in the first half of 2021.

1. For those of you who use a free Google account (@gmail.com) with or without an Android phone, please make sure that you understand the implications of the upcoming changes especially if you use Google to store lots of photos from your phone/tablet etc, you may start getting surprising results after 1st June 2021
   High quality and Express quality content will count toward your Google Account storage. Once you reach your storage limit, you can either subscribe to Google One (where available) for additional storage, or delete content in order to continue with the free storage option in Photos.
2. For more information go to
   • https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/10214036
   • https://support.google.com/photos/answer/10100180?p=storagepolicy&visit_id=637492838748348521-2190618293&rd=1
3. Options:
   • Keep it free: you will have to be more careful with what you store in your emails, Google Drive and Photos as they all eat into your 15GB free storage. You can always see how much storage you are using for example at the bottom of your Gmail inbox or by going to https://one.google.com/u/0/storage
   • Pay to get more storage: starting from £1.59/month or £15.99/year for 100GB – again go to https://one.google.com/u/0/storage and scroll down

LASTPASS PASSWORD MANAGER

1. If you use LastPass (from LogMeIn) to manage your passwords (instead of your browser password manager – click here for more info), again they are changing their pricing model.
2. This one will hit harder (only one device type) and sooner as from 16th March 2021 – full (complicated) details at https://support.logmeininc.com/lastpass/help/what-can-i-expect-to-change-for-lastpass-free-on-march-16-2021
3. Options:
   • Keep it free: migrate to another product
     https://uk.pcmag.com/password-managers/131784/had-it-with-lastpass-free-here-are-some-alternatives
     https://techpp.com/2021/02/18/free-lastpass-alternatives-password-managers/
     I have just moved to Bitwarden – https://bitwarden.com/pricing/ – really easy to transfer over your passwords – https://bitwarden.com/help/article/import-from-lastpass/
     Important: if you decide to move to Bitwarden (or other), once you’re happy with the new one, you should remove LastPass from all your devices and then login to your account via browser and destroy “sessions” and then the account completely
   • Pay to continue using LastPass on more than one device: https://www.lastpass.com/pricing