An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

My opinion (not Google's): The legal issue should be solved by enacting appropriate legislation (e.g. they must give your data back to you upon request, or else they must get a court order to block the data's return), not by everyone using overtly inferior technology* to work around it.

This would probably create a lot of extra work for people like me (my SRE job has to do with data classification and permissions). I am entirely willing to do that work, because I believe that users ought to own their own data. But either the business or the government has to decide that the work is worth doing, and so far the former has not made that decision.

* I consider it "inferior" under the reasonable-to-me assumption that the average consumer is just barely capable of installing automated updates on "user-friendly" operating systems like Windows, and would have no idea how to e.g. rent a colo, SSH in to fix a problem, etc. Obviously, if you are capable of figuring those things out, then you do you. But I'm concerned with the needs of average consumers, not you.