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With all the horror stories I've heard of them shutting down peoples' accounts with no explanation, recourse, or way to recover their contents, I have to agree.

• klipt 6y ago
  Yeah, when a normal bank closes your account, you can open one at another bank. Google closes your bank account, you potentially lose your email, passwords, contacts, documents...
  • d1zzy 6y ago
    To take this comparison further: you still need to transfer your assets out of the first bank, otherwise you lose all of that. Similarly you would need to get your digital assets out of Google, using Takeout. But not sure if Takeout is a service you can access when Google Account is locked, if not, it should be.
    • visarga 6y ago
      You need more than takeout. There should be a grace period when you're allowed to switch your accounts that rely on the Gmail address before they kill it. Maybe at first they could block only the sending of emails so you could still receive confirmation emails. By the way, why is closing an account a practice instead of closing just the sending of emails?
• d1zzy 6y ago
  When was the last such horror story you heard? (and I specifically mean shutting down access to Google Account and all services) Last time I heard this type of story was back in Google+ times when it was trying to enforce some silly real name policy.
  • pluto9 6y ago
    Here are some, published just a couple weeks ago: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-users-locked-out-after-years-2020-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-users-locked-out-afte... Several of these stories have appeared on HN just over the past year or so as well. Edit: The amount of downvoting on this and my original comment is puzzling to me. If someone who takes issue with it would care to explain what the problem is, I'd sincerely like to hear about it.
    • tanseydavid 6y ago
      Upvoted -- thank you for the link to recent incidents.