Us internet people rely on a bunch of services to conduct our daily goings-on. Not only do we consume a lot of social media, but we also do online shopping, digital banking, various forms of communication (email, instant messaging, etc.) and we might frequently utilize cloud storage for accessing photos, documents and so on. Most of us also have devices that are hooked up to an account from Microsoft, Google or Apple.
So, suppose one of the aforementioned companies decides to cut you off. They up and decide that your account no longer deserves to exist and they kick you off their services and point to some arbitrary section of their terms of service as justification. How fucked are you?
I read a post today about just that, where due to some mix-up, an Apple user got all of their Apple stuff bricked after having their Apple ID banned by Apple. In the particularly walled-garden Apple ecosystem this effectively means you are unpersoned, as all of the devices need to be hooked up to Apple services and you are very much encouraged to throw your entire digital life into the care of the Apple megacorporation. Android folks likely aren't in any real position to laugh either, since Google would likely leave you in a very similar situation if they were to make the same arbitrary decision to ban your Google account. And although the risk to your average Joe is just that one of these corporations makes a stupid mistake, if you happen to be someone more important, you are also at the whims of the Trump admistration which may compel arbitrary removal of your account by any and all of the megacorps. Say, for the sake of argument, if you are investigating the genocide committed by Israel, for example.
The situation is further exacerbated by how Google et all also offer people the option to log into unrelated services with their existing digital identity. This means that not only might you lose access to your email and device services, but simultaneously you would lose access to any third-party services that have been linked to that now-banned user account.
So, what I am here to propose is that you should avoid linking your whole digital life into a single digital identity. The convenience of having everything hooked up to your Google or Apple user might seem very tempting, as you avoid having to deal with multiple passwords, recovery procedures, registration and login screens and so on, but simultaneously you are putting a whole lot of trust on one entity that realistically does not care about you whatsoever. And not only does that put you at risk of losing access to everything, it also potentially exposes you to the risk of someone else gaining access to all of your stuff if they manage to break into just one of your accounts.
As an alternative, I would recommend decentralizing your digital identity as far as is reasonable. Avoid the "login with Google" buttons and instead register regular accounts. Maintain an offline password manager, so that you don't have to memorize a bunch of password while also not becoming dependent on a cloud-based password manager that might cut you off. Utilize P2P syncing tools like Syncthing to move important files between your devices, such as your encrypted password databases. And make sure that you have a device that allows you to conduct your usual computing needs without needing a megacorporation user account to use. There is no good reason for why your operating system or your office suite should not be able to function offline or without some kind of a specific digital identity.
It's hard to become completely invulnerable to some key service just dropping off the face of the earth or them banning you. For example, I would imagine that I would be in some amount of trouble if my email provider removed my account, since I do have a fair number of services connected to that email address. There are ways to mitigate that by having backup email addresses (which I do), or by owning your email domain so you can migrate from one service to another without losing your address. But even just having your email separated from your Google, Apple or Microsoft ID already helps to some extent, as long as you can trust the email provider anyway.
If there is any lesson to be learned here, then it probably ought to be that you should not put your whole digital life in the hands of one or two megacorporations that are entirely willing to be incompetent or malicious with regards to how they deal with your data and access. By diversifying your digital ecosystem and by adopting tools and services that you are better in control of, you reduce that risk. And with how much you might have at stake, that probably is worth doing sooner than later.
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