What if service shuts up

Om Malik had asked a very valid question. What happens to people when a service shut. He could see telephone numbers being lost. He could see people loosing their business.

I say what happened when people forget to login to their accounts for a 30 days period.
What would happen to those 2.8GB of data in gmail accounts.
What would happen if google while trying to bail out gives off all the private data it has collected till date.
What about AOL releasing user data, by mistake.
What can be done about them

My take nothing. Yes nothing. You cannot really expect to have a cake and eat it too. Once you are using a free service, that pretty much it. You are not paying them anything so they are not really obliged to provide you any guarantees. Its upto them what they want to do. Yes if you have paid them, then you have right to ask for anything. Better still I say back up all your important data on you hard disk and never trust some naive startups. Hopefully google will be there for a long long time.

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