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I've never understood why people would actually trust their data to Google or any Big Tech company when there's no guarantee one will always have access to it.
That said, we need laws to guarantee people can always reclaim their data even if their account is closed or the company goes bust.
Being locked out from google account is one of my biggest fears in practical computer usage. Over the years I can't even tell how much I'm sunk into using tiny pieces of google's services, even though for most crucial things I tend to omit google and look for alternatives that are easier to handle in problematic situation. Mail is one of the things I'm most worried about.
At what point does it make sense to take this to court?
When you have a trillion dollars stashed away. Then you wouldn't care about lawyer costs. That's the main reason big corps get away with doing what they are doing.
Pro-tip Only use Google SSO for things you don't care about. While in would be a pain if I lost my google account, I can still access Twitter, Discord, GitHub, Bitbucket, stack overflow etc as they aren't bound to Google. My emails/hangouts chats however would be lost unless I took a backup (I haven't but I might one day when I decide to go ad-free)
Tip: Get your own domain from a non-google registrar, then connect to Gmail if you prefer. If you ever are locked out, you can just move the address to another email-provider. Another trick is to use always have forwarding enabled in Gmail, to Outlook.com or another provider. All email will be forwarded despite your account being locked, so you will not miss out on important info. And use Google Takeout for backing u…
I wish there was a way to pay for Google (such as Google One) and it meant Google wouldn't ban your Gmail account. Period. However from reading HN anecdotes, it seems like they don't care about you (even if you're a paying customer). I realize this could feel like extortion, but it would be well worth the peace of mind.
Tip: Get your own domain from a non-google registrar, then connect to Gmail if you prefer. If you ever are locked out, you can just move the address to another email-provider. Another trick is to use always have forwarding enabled in Gmail, to Outlook.com or another provider. All email will be forwarded despite your account being locked, so you will not miss out on important info. And use Google Takeout for backing u…
The migration to fastmail.fm , including a decade of old mail messages, was flawless (if slow, but it's a lot of data!). I highly recommend this route.
If you don't use Google then you can't get locked out. I don't. I've never understood why people would actually trust their data to Google or any Big Tech company when there's no guarantee one will always have access to it. That said, we need laws to guarantee people can always reclaim their data even if their account is closed or the company goes bust.
I hope contacts would still be on my phone if I lost access, or is that hoping too much?
If you don't use Google then you can't get locked out. I don't. I've never understood why people would actually trust their data to Google or any Big Tech company when there's no guarantee one will always have access to it. That said, we need laws to guarantee people can always reclaim their data even if their account is closed or the company goes bust.
Then I got an Android phone and used the account for it. Then I used the calendar app which used the same account.
So it vendor lock-in all the way.
But I already migrated my email to a VPS and will migrate my calendar and contacts as well.
But this is not something everybody knows how to do.