The convenience trap
It’s obviously convenient to have everything in one place: one login, one interface, one payment.
With Google, you get email, docs, storage, a calendar, video calls, etc. Microsoft is the same. Even privacy-forward services like Proton have a bundled offer: email, storage, VPN, password manager, all behind one login.
It feels easy and simple. But it also means that if someone gets into your account, they get into absolutely everything.
There’s a security saying: attackers only need to succeed once, but defenders need to succeed every single time. When your whole online life is sitting behind a single account, you’ve made the successful attacker’s life a lot easier.
All it takes is one moment of weakness: a phishing link clicked by mistake or a re-used password. And suddenly your emails, your files, you calendar, maybe even your passwords, your whole online life are in someone else’s hands.
That’s called a single point of failure.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be an attack either. Google has locked plenty of people out of their accounts without explanation. And, when that happens, you lose it all.
There are forums full of people who suddenly discovered their digital life was locked away because some big tech company (or, more likely, one of their automated systems) decided their account was problematic. And good luck reaching a human to get it fixed, even with a business account.
Spreading your services across multiple providers is definitely not as convenient. But, when everything goes south, it doesn’t cascade into total disaster.
Diversifying your accounts also makes it harder for a single provider to build a detailed profile of your activity. When your emails, your documents and your searches all sit in the same place, they know more about you than most of your friends do.
They say “don’t put all your eggs in the same basket”. That works online too.
Colin