Yahoo - The Resolution, and Perspective

I have my identiy back - yay!

After answering more questions, or having contact with them at the very least, nearly every day since my passwork was changed by someone (thereby effectively stealing my identity), I finally had my account restored yesterday. The final verification steps I had to take were to tell them what kind of computer I had when I first signed up with Yahoo - which was, I think, about 12 years and a half-dozen computers ago - and I had to provide them with a copy of my driver's license which is expired because of my poor vision but they didn't care about that apparently because I got a note from them yesterday with a new password. I went in and reset it again, using a password that is nothing like the old one so hopefully will be less steal-able now - and probably less memorable to me - lol!

Anyway...the result of all this is that I now realize how much impact one company has over my life. My yahoogroups are important to me for the connections and friends and exchange of information...but all of this made me wonder how my life would be impacted if I lost them all? Plus I followed a link to look at photos of a friend's parrot in flickr, and couldn't do so because I had to sign into Yahoo first. I use my Yahoo Messenger to stay in touch with friends, family, and customers - and that simple method of communication was gone as well. To say nothing of the accumulation of SPAM that I have to delete out of my yahoo.com account every day or 2, before it gets totally unmanageable. (That's they only reason, evidently, I have a yahoo.com email address, is so people will have a place to send the SPAM.)

Anyway - I see the same thing happening with google.com, as a google ID is required to access more and more of the internet's functions...

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do about it all at this point. But I know that, after the last 10 days or so, I don't have the same feeling of contentment or security that I did before. I could lose my connections to my friends in the blink of an eye, and have no control over the outcome...because it's not about Yahoo, it's about the people who have become important to me through Yahoo.