You're broadcasting to family who will likely be using gmail, so what difference does it make? Google will get all the emails either way. Anyway, logical argumentation is completely useless in a personal situation like that.

If you want the address to be stable in the long term, you should probably use your own domain name instead of gmail or proton, if you're not already doing that. After that, it's possible to switch the hosting without changing the email address.

A newborn doesn't need an email address

The problem isnt gmail, the problem is using an email for this purpose. Switching to protonmail wont make a difference. If you want privacy, use a different communications protocol. For example, use signal, and if anyone wants baby updates, they better install it too, cause thats the only way you'll send them.

Id have been so pissed if my parents had destroyed any hope of privacy before i could tell them how fucked up that is. Your child didnt consent to letting google read about its life and see its pictures.

Whats her issue with using proton? It has all the features of google plus your setting ur kid up with a private ecosystem that will make them one of the very few who may have any hope of digital privacy in the future.

Could also just show her this comment chain where she can learn from us armchair experts.

Your daughter's Google account can be closed without appeal. All the memories gone. This less likely to happen using Proton or Tuta.

Wait until she's old enough to decide for herself. I would be really jacked off to find my parents had put my life online from the minute I was born.

And Google of all the ones she could have chosen? Your wife needs to have a good talk with herself.

I would just tell her that you should really not ever "create an account for your newborn child" who may not want their whole childhood documented on the internet forever later on in their life.

For all you know they may not turn out to keep being your daughter forever. It's kind of a gross overstepping of parental boundaries and something that should be left for them to decide.

This doesn't mean you can't keep records in case they want them in the future but as someone that grew up well before all this social media stuff it sort of terrifies me regarding the privacy and agency of younger generations.

Makes me glad I have always been extremely averse to having any sort of photos of me or any of my personal information anywhere online that I did not post till well into my 30s.

Do with this information what you will but I had that boundary crossed just with photos and such shared around way before I had any way to consent to it and some aspects still make me feel violated to this day and there is nothing I can do about it.

Why not use the emails you guys already have? I don't think I or even you guys would want to use an email created by parents, since the username might not even be something they would have chosen for themselves.

Let them have an email when they are old enough to create their own. Use something like simplelogin maybe instead for an alias email instead that still comes to your email but looks separate for relatives it is sent to? I wouldn't want a premaid email account of my own before I was old enough.

Have you considered putting letters written on paper in the post?

Seems unwise to give your child's early life story to any of these companies, especially when mapped to a network of her relatives and likely including photographs which people may not be as diligent to keep private as you.

Your daughter cannot consent to this, and it is your duty as parents to protect her privacy until she is old enough to decide for herself what to share and where.

Well, unless you convert everyone else to proton or similar services, you're kinda screwed on the privacy end of things already. I mean, it's better than nothing, I guess, but it's you're sending to addresses that aren't privacy friendly, it's still exposed on the recipient's end.

Not worth arguing about on that level.

Now, if the account is actually going to be the kid's some day, that's different. You can make the point of making sure that their first account with an "all in one" provider be with a service that's a better "business neighbor" for all the associated services. Keep the Google account for the very few things that can't be avoided, but shift primary usage of email, password management, etc to the less obnoxious service provider because they're a better service rather than arguing about practically non existent privacy in email.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/21/23315513/google-photos-csam-scanning-account-deletion-investigation

Google looks. Google reports. Even if you did nothing wrong you're guilty until you prove innocent and even then you'll never get your account back.

I don't get the whole email thing, people are already doing that stuff on Facebook and your relatives are probably there too.

"arguments" alone don't suffice.

a demonstration of how easy it is to use proton drive (to share videos and millions of photos she's going to dump on relatives who are barely interested in seeing another baby photo) and protonMail would be more convincing.

Privacy interfaces have evolved to be attractive to lambda users.

when it comes to your wife uploading your daughters photographs to google servers, she can't decide alone: you share the authority (but would this argument matter in a marriage? No?

would having a protonMail matter if the photographs are attachments and recipients have gmail? No.

good luck. Not an easy task