Ask HN: I’m scared of losing GMail access. Do email protection laws exist?

Hi, HN. The older I get, the more frightened I am of losing access to my GMail account. My trust in Google to do the right thing has diminished over time.

In the event Google decides to arbitrarily terminate my Google account, are there any email protections for me as a citizen of any country?

So much of the developed world digital life revolves around email usage. I don’t believe citizens of any nation have, in any government jurisdictions, any protection from businesses cutting off access to their email accounts. Am I wrong about this?

If not, how can I protect myself from suddenly being cut off from such a highly critical aspect of communication? The many institutions of the world intermingle government, financial, educational, utility, and other service access with the concept of an email address.

Once upon a time, GMail was a revolutionary product. I now find some of Google’s practices anti-consumer and a few business decisions of theirs a liability.

Your fear is rational. It's happened to other people. I would suggest going to a paid provider like Fastmail and checking their terms of service. I don't know of any protections that exist by law at the moment.

My horror story:

I have a mentally ill relative who only logged in every 6 months. He got treatment and wanted to resume using his email account. Guess what? Google thought his activity was "suspicious" and permanently locked him out. We went through an infuriating loop of proving his identity, then getting a message saying a human was reviewing it. Then we'd go back to proving his identity. This went on for 15-20 cycles over the course of 8 months.

The only way to get out of it was to contact my friend who works for Google. Otherwise my relative had lost gigabytes of irreplaceable data. We would've gladly paid $1,000+ for the privilege of talking to a real human about it, but that's impossible.

Gmail was revolutionary because it was, for most of its history, better than even paid email services.

OP might know that paid services exist, but many of them have a reputation for having worse search and fewer access options than Gmail.

My concern is primarily that I already have this email address attached to a plethora of services, many of which I've even forgotten. I parted with an older email address many years ago when I was much younger, but now I'm faced with an account I've had for much longer, which is attached to many more important websites and software.

> Google is unlikely to kick out users unless there's some bad behaviour (which may seem innocent to you)

I don't believe I've ever violated any terms of service Google has ever outlined. In practice, I have nothing to worry about. This concern of mine primarily revolves around legal protections, and rights as a "digital citizen" of sorts.