Your whole digital life is behind one account that can be closed with no warning
For a lot of people, one Google or Apple account is the master key to everything — email, fifteen years of photos, documents, the "sign in with Google" login for every other site, the 2FA codes, the phone itself. Incredibly convenient right up until it isn't.
Every few weeks there's another story of an account getting flagged by an automated system — a photo the scanner misread, a payment dispute, some terms violation nobody can name — and the whole thing is just gone. No human to call, an appeal form that returns a templated denial, and fifteen years of email evaporates along with the ability to log into half the internet, because those logins were all federated through the account that just died.
What gets me is there's no physical-world equivalent. A bank can't seize your house, your photo albums, your mail, and your car keys at once over a suspected policy violation with no notice and no appeal. Hand all of it to one company and that's roughly the exposure you've signed up for.
The standard advice — export your data, use your own domain for email, stop federating logins — is correct, but it's constant work to fight a default that's engineered to be frictionless. The convenient path and the resilient path point in opposite directions.
Has anyone actually de-risked this without turning their day-to-day into a chore? Or is some amount of single-point-of-failure just the cost of a modern account?
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