What happens if Facebook or Twitter or, say, your blog hosting service, makes you take a different user name? Sound impossible? It’s happened. Last week, a software researcher named Danah Boyd woke up to find her entire blog had disappeared, and in fact, had been renamed, because her hosting service had given her blog’s name to someone else.

And as important as they are, what protects our accounts are the terms of service agreements. If you read them—and who does?—you’d learn, probably to no surprise, that they protect the provider a lot more then they protect you.