Why? You're going to reference them from Google Drive. Google has 400 trillion gazillion servers with copies of it. There's no way you can lose it! You wouldn't do anything weird, so there's absolutely no reason to think you'd lose your account. And honestly, we're all humans here - surely you can reach out to a company as large as Google and speak to a human if there's an issue this significant.

Another consideration: kids do not have the ability to think ahead and consider future consequences. It's one of the last functions of the brain to develop, and it doesn't fully complete until, often, you've already finished college. Looking through the comments in the reddit thread, it appears the daughter had her dissertation on her google drive and lost it despite having done nothing wrong herself.

And just the final point I want to drive home: these people lost their google accounts because of what someone else did. Nobody thinks ahead to account for something like that.

At what point are we going to start looking at digital mail the same way we do physical mail? It's equally as important today. It needs protections, regulations, and oversight.