Leased Identity

You have a Gmail account. Do you think you own it?

No. It is leased to you. And that lease may go away in an instant.

Consider this. You write a letter to your friend. A simple paper letter. You sign it, put it in an envelope, and mail it. Your friend receives it, reads it, and puts it away. They know the letter is from you because you signed it. Nobody can deny who you are or deny that you signed the letter with your name.

Email, as it was designed decades ago, follows the same idea. You write a letter and send it. A mail agent adds headers with your name and email address as you configure it. Again, nobody can stop you from using your name. The only caveat is that you have to be savvy enough to set up, host, and maintain software to send and receive emails.

Gmail (and other email providers) offers the convenience of hosted email and an email address at the domain @gmail.com. Log into a Google account, write a message, send it: as simple as that.

You use the new email address everywhere online to sign up on websites, services, and newsletters. The email accumulates years of messages and connected accounts. In a sense, it’s an online yourself. If you lose access to the email, you’ll lose access to everything connected to it.

But the caveat here is that Google controls access to the account, not you. Google decides if it is still okay for you to log into the email and check for new messages. And Google may revoke such access at a moment’s notice, with no way to appeal.

There is no end to horror stories about lost Gmail accounts. Sometimes people were lucky to get the accounts back, but sometimes accounts are gone for good.

With the account go all email messages, all connected services, online storage, etc. It is the death of an online persona representing you.

You never owned the email address. You just leased it from Google.

But it does not have to be this way. We, the users, should have full and complete control over our identity and data we created. Companies can offer software or systems, but the convenience of it should not cost ownership and agency over digital life.