Don't you think that "security" non-sequitur boogeyman is a bit too forced? You took my example, cherry-picked some words, and turned it into something else entirely. And too bad it doesn't even hold up because surrendering your phone number won't prevent securities fraud, which is what I was specifically referring to in my example.
I have user account on my personal Google Workspace domain that is used purely for superuser access (my day-to-day account doesn't have special access).
I recently had to log into it for the first time in a few years to make a config change to the domain, and it wouldn't let me in because the 2FA code wasn't working, and a recovery code wasn't sufficient to enable privileged access. I had to reach out to Google Workspace support to regain admin access to my domain.
Thankfully, they were able to do so (although it took a few days and I had prove ownership of it).
So there's an example of a situation where an account that's not logged into for a long time doesn't mean that it's forgotten or unused.
If you haven't used your $whatever in a year, why do you want to use it now? Replace $whatever with whatever you want and you'll see how absurd this question is.
I would personally not want my account recovery tied to an account I rarely use. That seems full of unnecessary risk. What if you forget that Gmail password? What if it’s compromised and you don’t even notice for almost a year? What if Google decides to change their retention for unused accounts to just 6 months?
I actually had my gmail's backup email at yahoo recycled and I had to remake that account. But genrally I consider these email accounts as my master key to all my other accounts. It has a master password that I am certain I could not lose except simultaneous major head trama and destruction of all my belongings.
If that email was lost, yeah I could be screwed out of other accounts. But no security system is perfect.
> If you haven't used your $whatever in a year, why do you want to use it now? Replace $whatever with whatever you want and you'll see how absurd this question is.
This is a silly statement specifically because the choice of “$whatever” determines whether it’s “absurd”. It’s definitely not absurd to assume that a year old sandwich is trash, while it is absurd to assert that an unaccessed safe deposit box is trash.
But of course you also pay the bank for your safe deposit box. If you stop paying then they absolutely will discard the contents (or send them off to the state, depending on laws). No one stores abandoned junk for free. If you want you pay Google for your account I bet they’ll keep it even if you never log in.
If you leave your ham sandwich in the office fridge for a single week, anyone is justified in throwing it away.
The trouble is you think that you are in possession of a ham sandwich that Google is taking away when in reality you’ve left your ham sandwich in Google’s fridge and they are sick of storing the obviously-abandoned sandwich for you.
Except it's just an excuse to make everyone surrender their phone numbers as one more way to tie people to their real identities. You try hard to paint one of the wealthiest companies in the world as some kind of victim, when in reality it's them that used Gmail as a trojan horse to make people create Google accounts so that they can spy on everyone online, and increasingly in the real world too.
Also contrary to your insinuation that I'm an entitled jerk trying to rip off a trillion dollar company, I de-Googled a long time ago. Because I know they're the company that lets their clueless robots brand desperate parents trying to cure their children as child predators, punishes them by taking away the key to their entire digital lives, and worse, doubles down and continues to defame them when proven wrong [1].
But it's not fair to fault people who still depend on Google. Lack of informed consent, reinforced by dark patterns and justified with "user-friendliness" BS is what drew people in. Peer pressure also forces people to create accounts when they otherwise wouldn't have. I just have zero tolerance for corporate cheerleaders who justify this sort of thing by blaming the victim in the most condescending way possible.
> Except it's just an excuse to make everyone surrender their phone numbers
“Why do you need this account you’ve abandoned for a year” is a different question than “why does Google need your phone number”. I have no doubt Google loves to collect phone numbers for several reasons, none of them altruistic.
> contrary to your insinuation … I de-Googled a long time ago
