I am familiar with that page. (Although I'm not sure how to interpret your "You mean like[...]" phrasing. It doesn't make sense in response to what I wrote.)

I am familiar with that page. (Although I'm not sure how to interpret your "You mean like[...]" phrasing. It doesn't make sense in response to what I wrote.) There's good reason not to go along with the security theater it describes. App Passwords are not really passwords in the conventional sense. The format makes it difficult to actually use them like a password. They're 16-digit sequences that Google generates for you (you have more control over your child's SSN than you do over these non-passwords)—hard to remember, and that's because you're pretty much not expected to. You're expected to key it in approximately once and configure the relevant app to save it in perpetuity, rather than typing it in. What these things actually are should be familiar to the people here. They're API tokens (and pretty weak ones at that, relatively speaking)—just billed under a different, more familiar name, for a non-technical audience who wouldn't understand that term. If you are currently using a strong but nonetheless memorable password for Gmail and have your mail client set up to always prompt you for it rather than storing its own copy, then switching to one of these app-specific tokens will actually make your email less secure. Furthermore, in comparison, a 16-digit sequence has less entropy than a passphrase comprising 6 words chosen from even a very small 1000-word dictionary. In summary: - worse experience than an actual password - less secure A less cumbersome approach to address the threat Google is pretends to be concerned about here? Allow people to deconsolidate their accounts. This would actually have other happy knock-on effects, such as mitigating the impact of the now-familiar phenomenon where people get locked out of significant parts of their online and offline lives when something goes wrong with their account. Also wouldn't hurt their image in the current conversations about legally imposed breakup.