What if, five years ago when you signed up for [email protected], you listed [email protected] as your recovery address?

Now, thanks to this move by Yahoo, your Google account is in danger of being compromised.

Which, honestly, it kind of a dumb move on Google's part. I was never a fan of that recovery address process. The 2-factor auth they've implemented since is much better.

A year is a very short period of time. Many people have been active on the internet for decades.

What if the person doesn't have access to the internet for a year?

.. and Yahoo or any other similarly priced services should know this how?

Meaning, you get what you paid for and if your usage of said service falls outside of an expected range then don't be surprised if your service is suspended.

It's 2013. I feel like this particular lesson should be well established, public domain knowledge but here it is again:

Free data, storage and associated services means that you are the product. If a provider decides to discontinue a particular product line, that really is their prerogative. If you want otherwise, then pay for the services you use and rely on and then you'll have a valid complaint if they are suspended.

They are not discontinuing their product line or even canceling service for some of its customers. What they do is effectively transferring online identities they granted from less deserving, from their perspective, users to more deserving ones.

There is a lot of problems with this from both from security and moral points of view.