Inactive Google Account Policy

Imagine all the normal people who can not run their own mail server and do not have the paranoia or the time to set up 3 of everything and never miss the periodic chores to keep them all alive just to guard against one of them being cancelled.

You certainly don't want anything important like your retirement account to rely on something transient like your isp email, or even a paid email from some smaller company that you might forget to pay on time one year, or they just decide they don't like you for not even necessarily anything you did.

So you use gmail or hotmail etc, not because they are free, because they arre presumed to outlive everything else, and be safer because of that. And that much is completely true and not a mistake.

There are a few really bad things on a collision course here that hasn't been properly dealt with at a society/regulation level yet:

* gmail, and email in general, is not an inconsequential thing like a Spotify account, or like email when it was new and nothing important in life depended on it yet. Life-critical things depend on it now. There are many things now where your email is the ultimate way a service provider knows you. There is no office you can go to to clear up any kind of account error as an ultimate option.

* Yet, providers are allowed to TREAT it as a trivial inconsequintial thing.

* google absolutely is responsible for actively drawing people to use gmail and become dependant on gmail and other google services. It isn't good enough to say they don't make anyone, they do actively pursue it. Same goes for others not just google.

* too many consequential things are allowed accept mere email and login credentials as the only form of proof of identity without an equivalent for the ultimate option you always used to have for any possible thing: "Go down town to the credit union office and present myself and my drivers license and my birth certificate, or 20 other people from the community who all simply say "yeah that's her, I'm even the doctor who delivered her, and she's even your own siter in law so you know she was married to the house owner, so give her her house deed even though the husband died in the war last year and the town clerks office burned down and no one can produce the piece of paper now"

I don't know what I would do if betterment.com decided not to honor my login or I couldn't repond via either of the two email addresses on file. It's 2 different addresses from two different providers, but even 2 is still only 2. If one can break, two can break. So much of my life's resources all hinging on something so flimsy. This is not robust. Now multiply that by x billion other people, most of whom are not aware how fragile their access to these important things is, and how little they can do about it if they are unlucky and have a problem.

Why

No one said anything about Google absolutely deleting data. They specifically state, "reserves the right to delete an inactive Google Account and its activity and data" ... and further below "and all of its content and data may be deleted"

Call me suspicious, but reserves the right and may be deleted to me says that they may not actually have plans of deleting the account data outright. Maybe they just can't even guarantee being able to completely wipe all the associated account data. I think they could have the external appearance of having deleted the account with no real internal change.

Oh and here's a question. If they delete an account, and then someone goes in and registers the same name, then what? Talk about an opportunity for further account hijacking (for example, password recovery from old logins). To prevent this, presumably they would still at least maintain a record that the account previously existed and cannot be registered again.

Didn't they say they weren't going to allow email address reuse?

>Don't depend on "free" for critical functions.

All the cards are stacked against the users though. It's not that easy for a non-tech person to use any sort of email/photo library etc that isn't free from Google/Apple etc.

Even self hosting email is impossible now. You won't be able to send emails because nothing trusts you.

If Google intentionally incentivized everyone to move their entire digital lives into their platform for profit, they should have some sort of responsibility for that. There have absolutely been significant impact to people's lives because they've gotten locked out of their account for reasons that even Google can't explain, and there is no recourse or action they can take.