I've been working lately with a less-than-polished bit of open source software that, unfortunately, was written to be used by non-technical users. The user experience is not enhanced by my ignorance, and my ignorance is not much abated by reading the instructions. So the upshot was having to do work over again because the software in question took the painstaking fruit of all that typing and clicking (and proofreading and fixing) and moshed it into a format readable only to it. Which would be forgiveable if I had been allowed to correct "mistakes" after they were published to the website and found. But I wasn't. And of course, some mistakes couldn't be caught until after the changes were published. (Nice catch-22, that!)
All of which left one option: Delete-and-do-over.
Needless to write, I was less than thrilled. Mostly because I have this entitled notion that, regardless of platform or software, the actual data is mine. My typing. My clicking. My wading through misspelled Help that would have had me on the curb Back In The Day. Which is to say, my time, darnitalready! Time that could be much more productively used. Thus, if data is time and time is money, I want my money back. Except that consumers have always allowed software--commercial and free--a pass on the havoc it can wreak, and changing that mindset is akin to boiling the ocean.
Yes, there's definitely a case to be made for making passwords unrecognizable through encryption--no question. But otherwise, a user should be able to take her/his data and go home anytime s/he wants. And despite the fact that the folks who wrote the software in question are more skilled at writing code than I, I can't say as I think much of their design. Or, for that, matter, their low valuation of their users' time.
