The users should change this by changing the email provider. Worked for me.

Yep, same. After this last G Suite fiasco, I finally moved my domain off Google onto another host that I pay for. It's nice to know I'm supporting a platform that cares more about privacy than Google.

Plus, it lit a fire under me to rely on Google services less and less. I had a second Google One account that I stopped paying for as well, cause f them.

I'd love to change, but I'm signed up everywhere with my gmail account. I feel kidnapped at this point.

And it is not as easy as just changing my login email everywhere.

1. Some system (such as government ones) make it very, very difficult to change, not even possible on some

2. How do I make sure I'm not forgetting some random site I don't frequently use

3. What about everyone's contacts where they have me saved with my @gmail account, I can't update their addressbooks

At this point I think the only think I do is pray for my gmail account not being blocked.

When I moved, I did it gradually, over a year or two. No reason to do it in a day. Send out an email to everyone in your address book, migrate over the most important and easiest services first, and then others whenever you use them and think of it. Then, at some stage, only unimportant stuff will trickle in, and you will check that account less and less. Maybe setup an autoreply to point to your new address, and auto forwarding. There will be some holdouts, and some you forget. But, arguably, if you didn't use a service in the last two years, the inconvenience caused by your google account being cancelled will be limited. It all still be annoying to loose your android apps and music and whatnot, but not your whole life.

It took about a year for me to fully switch. Even now, I haven’t deleted my Gmail address - I just forward everything to my new address at my domain, and whenever anything appears in my Gmail address which I would like to switch over I make it happen.

I even recently did the switch from one mail provider to another while keeping my email address, since I took the advice of people years ago to choose a provider who supports custom domains and use them. Although I spent a fair bit of time researching, the process itself took about 2-3 hours. When people say it’s easy to switch between providers when you own the domain, they mean it.

It’s not an easy task at all, but you don’t have to do it in one hit. Just take your time - in the meantime you hope that your Google account doesn’t get axed, but even if it does you’re in a better position than if you stayed.

On forgetting a random site: use a password manager; then, you have an effective memory of all the services you use as well as their logins. This is something you should do whether you use Gmail or not. (This might be a bit redundant if you use Google to log in everywhere at the moment, but you’ll thank yourself later if you start this now.)

What if your emails go to a spam bucket/get "lost", and you have no way of knowing?

I mean, this is really what prevents me from eliminating the free email providers from my life, not that I can't afford paid email.

Whether or not it's overly paranoid, it's a pretty general pattern that when you venture off the beaten trail, you have more uncommon problems.

Don’t self host. Use one of the major paid providers with a custom domain. Never had issues sending from Fastmail.

ProtonMail is becoming a very promising platform.

How do you know Google are at fault?

I don't know either, but I do know we never get the full story on these.

My cousin got banned and my colleagues got banned few years back. The colleagues were banned because they used a common laptop computer and google terminates any associated accounts if one of them is suspended. I can provide screenshots and assure you that Google terminates because their algorithm determines a person to be risk. Almost always its someone reporting you or some financial issue.

Few years back they banned users who failed to use Google Wallet and had Paypal, they also banned users who sold their dev edition pixel.

Recently they banned youtube users who watched the live stream of Russian invasion. Check the threads here https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/

They were unbanned after a huge ruckus but thousands of cases which fail to bring any attention are just banned for life and all data (gmail, payment, drive, photos etc) are all gone in the morning.

I don't think it matters who's at fault, I think Google should allow the user to extract all their data even after account termination, would be fine if they charged a reasonable fee even.

And it's not like they don't have the capability: the Google Takeout service packages up substantially all of your data on Google services in an archive for download.

Only if you take it out before your account is locked. When was the last time you ran a backup of your google account?

I don't think anyone at Google is incentivized to fix this. Because fixing it will probably increase fraud, decrease revenue, and increase operational costs.

I think the only realistic path to fix this is through Federal legislation that gives new rights to users of online services. Google will fix this, only if it is legally forced to fix it.

The second possibility might be through a class action lawsuit of some kind. But I think the current Supreme Court is ideologically hostile to giving power to human beings over mega-corporations, so I don't see that going anywhere.

The third possibility might be a consumer led migration away from Google that hurts their bottom line and forces them to deal with it. But the number of people who are willing to do this is probably minuscule, so I don't think this will happen.

Probably the only way to fix this is to have google accounts linked to some kind of legal identity so they can avoid frauds repeatedly creating new accounts.