I hope he never actually knows about this account before he's given access to it. I can imagine being raised with this being a thing and developing a mind palace around the contents of the inbox.
I can't imagine losing access to 18 years of life's history and memories because Google decided to kill free accounts, or charge more than you're comfortable paying, or they suffer catastrophic data loss. Or they decide to kill Workspace accounts and they can't be converted, and you are given the data in a mostly unusable format bc they weren't told how to export the data by the law.
I've lost entire wings of my mind palace because I lost a notebook, diary, hard drive, or published works and been bereft of that knowledge or those memories. Some wings I've been lucky enough to rebuild, others are like if the Notre Dame had never been visually captured, drawn, or scanned.
Imagine planning on recording 18 years of your infant's life--all their familial social connections and day-to-day happenstance; the things that make a person who they are--, preemptively, on Google's behalf. Then imagine not even having a guarantee that you will be able to use the data you collected for its originally intended purpose.
Set this up locally and in a format you control, and can secure yourself. Put it on a tape drive or on a USB in a digital storage preserver (something to power on the nand cells so they don't bit rot)
You don't know who your son is going to turn out to be. He might come to resent you for giving Google that level of insight into his life, or for recording it at all. After all, you have decided that your son does not have a right to privacy, and essentially given it away. Better to keep it local so it can be destroyed if that's what he would desire.
Valid point. I'm backing up my google drive to my NAS for the same reason and I should do the same with the email accounts in our families google workspace domain.
We're lucky to have snatched [ourlastname].[our countries TLD] so my son can have a really nice firstname@lastname.at address which in itself seems valuable these days.
I'm also worried that if he gets the account too soon and does some kind of unintended wipe, all data is lost so maybe the backup is the way to go
> We're lucky to have snatched [ourlastname].[our countries TLD
Been planning to do this for my family as well. But after my (admin) passing, and with multiple children sharing the same domain name, one of my children will have to be the domain admin for everyone in the family. This might be fine if they remain in good terms and have enough trust of the admin to not screw their primary online identity...
I have yet to figure this part of the equation out.
I don't see anyone mentioning Google Takeout (takeout.google.com) - it's easy to use.
I have a suggestion to make it easier - At the highest level of your Google Drive, make a folder containing the easily exportable types such as docs, sheets, pdfs, photos.
That's what I meant when I said they would be given the data in a mostly unusable format because Google wasn't told _how_ to export the data by the law.
When they shut down GPM I requested my listening data via Takeout and it was in a format that was absolutely useless to me. OP seemed to be in Germany so Google has been told by the law to allow data exfiltration, but as we've seen with Apple, these companies engage in malicious compliance and there's no guarantee that they'll get usable data from Takeout.
There's also no guarantee that over 18 years the EU regulatory bodies will remain uncaptured, and never reverse course on data controls such that Google could conceivably kill Takeout as a product due to "the excessive costs involved in supporting an organization wide data exfiltration tool"
> I can't imagine losing access to 18 years of life's history and memories because Google decided to kill free accounts, or charge more than you're comfortable paying, or they suffer catastrophic data loss.
Oof. Google now charges me more than I’m comfortable paying and want us to upgrade to the next tier due to data usage.
I’m happy to move off to another email provider, but my wife is upset that she’ll lose access to all the docs that have ever been shared with her on that Google Apps account. This is truly hell.
Apparently, after we migrate off we can recreate a free, non-email Google apps account “me@mydomain.com”, but it’ll be empty.
Suggestions, and sympathy for poor decision making 10+ years ago, welcome.
I did this for my son and my daughter for many years.
Unfortunately, I did it by making them gmail accounts. Google without warning closed both accounts when my daughter was 12 for being under-age. I lost everything. I tried to appeal to get them to unlock the accounts long enough for me to get the contents out, but talking to a human being at Google is famously impossible.
You should be able to find the contents in your sent mail, no? search "in:sent". This is assuming you sent the email from your own gmail account (not sure how other providers stash away sent mail or if they even do).
Don’t use Google, get a domain name and use another service where you’re in control.
I use fastmail and have been sending emails to my young sons “email”, which is just a subdomain of my personal email, so I guess technically it’s not his but I have a way to share all the mail with him.
We did this, setting up the Gmail address over a decade ago. I occasionally log in to ensure it is an “active” account in Google’s eyes. And it’s fun to read what we wrote back then.
But actually we didn’t send that much. It’s easy to forget the account exists during day to day life. Most of the emails are from when our child was a small baby. Still nice to read.
A bunch of comments have rightly pointed out that Google could suspend the account, close down Gmail entirely, etc. Well sure. Bad things can’t be entirely ruled out. But at least to me, this was a whimsical and easy idea, not life and death. If it disappeared I would be sad but life would go on.
On the other hand, my child has a clean name-based Gmail address reserved in case they need it later for internship applications or whatever.
I think it is extremely unlikely that Google pulls the plug on Gmail since it is the default identity token for all Google accounts.
Nope, don't do that. Well, maybe do it, it won't hurt.
But what you should be doing if you have some little fella hanging around is Print. Your. Photos.
And put them in a nice album, and let them grab it,touch it, look at the photos, together or alone. Having a physical copy of your smartphone 's photos is just... different
> And put them in a nice album, and let them grab it,touch it, look at the photos, together or alone.
And then print another batch and put them in a nice album and lock it in storage. Kids aged 1-4 will start literally eating the photos if you leave them alone with the album for more than a minute.
Source: we've made several such albums (and gifted several more to our parents) since our first daughter was born in 2019. All the albums need replacing now, and at least half of the photos need to be reprinted too.
True! But starting age 5 with a nice (and costly) album print you can go a long way. They eventually start caring for things as well, at some point... maybe :)
I created Gmail accounts for all three of my kids when they were infants. They're now 7, 13, and 15, and the fact that they have accounts makes it SOOOOOOOOO much easier to share them content they may care about in the future, like family vacation itineraries, congratulatory or welcome emails about specific events or achievements, copies of school transcripts, and perhaps most importantly, photos & albums. Now that the older two also have phones and have their own personal needs for email, it's convenient that they have established accounts based on their names that they can use, and I use Family Link to manage their access to stuff.
Whether you choose Google products, Apple products, or something else entirely, I heartily recommend creating accounts for your kids when they're young.
Sounds cool but that vacation itinerary isn't as meaningful to your 7 year old as it is to you. Also sounds like a nightmare to manage and a liability when Google decides that 7 year olds can't have accounts so it's deleted (PayPal blocked my account after 15 years because they found out I opened it when I was a teenager)
If you want to preserve documents, keep them in your own drive/cloud and share the folder once they're capable.
Also once they use/need an email, they probably don't need one created by mom 12 years ago already filled with junk that isn't theirs — just my opinion though.
Google lets you create kid accounts and manage them within your family entity, which also then allows you to share purchased apps with them, share Youtube/Music/TV subscriptions, etc. When kids get to be 13, you can convert those accounts to full accounts (but still optionally manage them using Family Link).
I don't care if things like vacation itineraries and emailed stories about the things we/they did together when they were small matter to them or not. We're just giving them the opportunity to make that decision, rather than not have those memory enhancers at all. My wife's family basically never kept anything, and my dad's house burned down with all our old printed photos, kid projects and keepsakes in it. It's easy to mitigate some of this potential loss through digital means.
This is nice and Google themselves had an ad campaign that did exactly this. It will
work until Google decides to delete the email address for some inane reason. I guess that’s partly why they nixed that campaign.
If that was the campaign they ran for the Google+ Photos feature launch in 2012 (when they released Photos before making it standalone in 2015), the other part is that the campaign encouraged people to take pictures of their very young children in order to catalog their life.
Then, their Google+ architecture allowed random people not part of the family group to view said photos of people's very young children, and it got a round in the tech news cycle. They started tightening up the architecture and in the process decoupled it from the dying Google+ to go on to release it in 2015.
This is sweet and lovely. I do this in two different ways - I send occasional emails to their IDs and write their journals in plain text.
I created their email IDs on my family’s domain so I can transfer them to whichever service provider fits them best. Right now, it is Google Workspace. For those mentioning about Google freezing your account accidentally, I’ve set Thunderbird to download a copy regularly. This is where I can search for emails from 20+ years ago and still reply or re-initiaite a conversation.
For the plain text, I write in the simplest form spiced up with some Markdown such as headings, lists, and the other basic formatting that are human readable. I also add static assets, such as the very funny and super cute images, audio, video, etc., in a folder for references to the journal entries.
All of these digital content for my daughters are in a separate folder with a few sub-folders. The day they want it, I will just give them a folder for them to continue from there.
My first daughter is a teenager now, and she is even more privacy-conscious than me. She has onions layers of personas for her online avatars -- be it for games, school friends, and other online friends. She is adamantly against using AI for creative processes, such as generative AI, though she uses ChatGPT regularly for her studies.
Own the content, while using other hosted or third-party services and have a backup. Be ready with the answer to, “How can I walk out of this?”
Readit News
I can't imagine losing access to 18 years of life's history and memories because Google decided to kill free accounts, or charge more than you're comfortable paying, or they suffer catastrophic data loss. Or they decide to kill Workspace accounts and they can't be converted, and you are given the data in a mostly unusable format bc they weren't told how to export the data by the law.
I've lost entire wings of my mind palace because I lost a notebook, diary, hard drive, or published works and been bereft of that knowledge or those memories. Some wings I've been lucky enough to rebuild, others are like if the Notre Dame had never been visually captured, drawn, or scanned.
Imagine planning on recording 18 years of your infant's life--all their familial social connections and day-to-day happenstance; the things that make a person who they are--, preemptively, on Google's behalf. Then imagine not even having a guarantee that you will be able to use the data you collected for its originally intended purpose.
Set this up locally and in a format you control, and can secure yourself. Put it on a tape drive or on a USB in a digital storage preserver (something to power on the nand cells so they don't bit rot)
You don't know who your son is going to turn out to be. He might come to resent you for giving Google that level of insight into his life, or for recording it at all. After all, you have decided that your son does not have a right to privacy, and essentially given it away. Better to keep it local so it can be destroyed if that's what he would desire.
We're lucky to have snatched [ourlastname].[our countries TLD] so my son can have a really nice firstname@lastname.at address which in itself seems valuable these days.
I'm also worried that if he gets the account too soon and does some kind of unintended wipe, all data is lost so maybe the backup is the way to go
Been planning to do this for my family as well. But after my (admin) passing, and with multiple children sharing the same domain name, one of my children will have to be the domain admin for everyone in the family. This might be fine if they remain in good terms and have enough trust of the admin to not screw their primary online identity...
I have yet to figure this part of the equation out.
I have a suggestion to make it easier - At the highest level of your Google Drive, make a folder containing the easily exportable types such as docs, sheets, pdfs, photos.
When they shut down GPM I requested my listening data via Takeout and it was in a format that was absolutely useless to me. OP seemed to be in Germany so Google has been told by the law to allow data exfiltration, but as we've seen with Apple, these companies engage in malicious compliance and there's no guarantee that they'll get usable data from Takeout.
There's also no guarantee that over 18 years the EU regulatory bodies will remain uncaptured, and never reverse course on data controls such that Google could conceivably kill Takeout as a product due to "the excessive costs involved in supporting an organization wide data exfiltration tool"
Oof. Google now charges me more than I’m comfortable paying and want us to upgrade to the next tier due to data usage.
I’m happy to move off to another email provider, but my wife is upset that she’ll lose access to all the docs that have ever been shared with her on that Google Apps account. This is truly hell.
Apparently, after we migrate off we can recreate a free, non-email Google apps account “me@mydomain.com”, but it’ll be empty.
Suggestions, and sympathy for poor decision making 10+ years ago, welcome.
you can “make a copy” of the docs shared to you. those copies are yours and you can download them. they’ll be included in backups, etc
You can also share them with a free account and then have the free account make copies
Then there is this which just scrolls on and on forever
https://killedbygoogle.com
(or https://gcemetery.co )
Dead Comment
Unfortunately, I did it by making them gmail accounts. Google without warning closed both accounts when my daughter was 12 for being under-age. I lost everything. I tried to appeal to get them to unlock the accounts long enough for me to get the contents out, but talking to a human being at Google is famously impossible.
Blessings to you for this warning. I'm going to do something about changing the location of this mailbox asap.
I use fastmail and have been sending emails to my young sons “email”, which is just a subdomain of my personal email, so I guess technically it’s not his but I have a way to share all the mail with him.
But actually we didn’t send that much. It’s easy to forget the account exists during day to day life. Most of the emails are from when our child was a small baby. Still nice to read.
A bunch of comments have rightly pointed out that Google could suspend the account, close down Gmail entirely, etc. Well sure. Bad things can’t be entirely ruled out. But at least to me, this was a whimsical and easy idea, not life and death. If it disappeared I would be sad but life would go on.
On the other hand, my child has a clean name-based Gmail address reserved in case they need it later for internship applications or whatever.
I think it is extremely unlikely that Google pulls the plug on Gmail since it is the default identity token for all Google accounts.
But what you should be doing if you have some little fella hanging around is Print. Your. Photos. And put them in a nice album, and let them grab it,touch it, look at the photos, together or alone. Having a physical copy of your smartphone 's photos is just... different
> And put them in a nice album, and let them grab it,touch it, look at the photos, together or alone.
And then print another batch and put them in a nice album and lock it in storage. Kids aged 1-4 will start literally eating the photos if you leave them alone with the album for more than a minute.
Source: we've made several such albums (and gifted several more to our parents) since our first daughter was born in 2019. All the albums need replacing now, and at least half of the photos need to be reprinted too.
I think the only use case that is better on the phone is video (they can't stop watching themselves as younger kids doing funny things).
But pics on screens... boring and not something I want to encourage
Whether you choose Google products, Apple products, or something else entirely, I heartily recommend creating accounts for your kids when they're young.
If you want to preserve documents, keep them in your own drive/cloud and share the folder once they're capable.
Also once they use/need an email, they probably don't need one created by mom 12 years ago already filled with junk that isn't theirs — just my opinion though.
I don't care if things like vacation itineraries and emailed stories about the things we/they did together when they were small matter to them or not. We're just giving them the opportunity to make that decision, rather than not have those memory enhancers at all. My wife's family basically never kept anything, and my dad's house burned down with all our old printed photos, kid projects and keepsakes in it. It's easy to mitigate some of this potential loss through digital means.
You're of course welcome to your opinion.
[1] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en
Then, their Google+ architecture allowed random people not part of the family group to view said photos of people's very young children, and it got a round in the tech news cycle. They started tightening up the architecture and in the process decoupled it from the dying Google+ to go on to release it in 2015.
https://youtu.be/zhPklt9nYas
I created their email IDs on my family’s domain so I can transfer them to whichever service provider fits them best. Right now, it is Google Workspace. For those mentioning about Google freezing your account accidentally, I’ve set Thunderbird to download a copy regularly. This is where I can search for emails from 20+ years ago and still reply or re-initiaite a conversation.
For the plain text, I write in the simplest form spiced up with some Markdown such as headings, lists, and the other basic formatting that are human readable. I also add static assets, such as the very funny and super cute images, audio, video, etc., in a folder for references to the journal entries.
All of these digital content for my daughters are in a separate folder with a few sub-folders. The day they want it, I will just give them a folder for them to continue from there.
My first daughter is a teenager now, and she is even more privacy-conscious than me. She has onions layers of personas for her online avatars -- be it for games, school friends, and other online friends. She is adamantly against using AI for creative processes, such as generative AI, though she uses ChatGPT regularly for her studies.
Own the content, while using other hosted or third-party services and have a backup. Be ready with the answer to, “How can I walk out of this?”
I have a nice notebook and I write letters to my daughters. Generally mundane day to day stuff or events that happen.
I hope to give it to them when they are older.
I do like the idea of an email though where you can send stuff for the future.
I try to print out physical photo books for them to look back on, but I'm not very disciplined on that.