He was talking about identity, not data. If google closes your account and you control your identity, you can take it elsewhere. If google controls both your identity and your data and then closes your account, you're screwed.

Data you can download, identity is hard to change.

For example: I can download all my mail from gmail (using POP or IMAP) regularly. If I lose the account I still have my mails. I can't change the mail amazon (or whatever other site) knows about unless I have access to my gmail account (I realize you can probably talk to their customer support but it doesn't scale well at all. I have about 120 different logins using my @gmail.com address...).

He's suggesting that if your account is shut down for some reason then your email address still works.

If you download all your mail for backup purposes using, say, POP3 then if Google does nuke your account you can switch to hosting yourself and maintain your email address.

This is what I do, but if Google ever fails me I'd probably switch to fastmail.fm or similar service instead of setting up a server. Unless you're interested in the ins and outs of setting up and maintaining an email server, it's something I'd outsource on a cost/benefit basis.

Actually that works quite well. If your photo accounts, your whatever accounts etc are all tied to a non-google login, then it won't matter that your google account is gone.

THE PROBLEM is that many places only accept google/facebook if not facebook alone. Although I have no freaken' idea why, it took a minute after adding google login to my site to add facebook, openid, etc..