There's a spectrum of things I can share with you over gmail. Currently, if I share an email with some formatted text and attachments up to 25MB, then it's yours to keep, but anything above 25MB is shared as a link to a Google Drive upload, which remains under my account, and I can always delete or modify.
But I don't see any particular reason for where exactly the line between the two should be - why wouldn't it be that I could make anything I shared with you ephemeral, a-la Snapchat? And going back to email, it was actually MS Exchange who have supported the option to "Recall this message" [0] for many years, while gmail decided to not implement anything like that.
Interesting; for me line seems fairly thick at "ownership" level (which just shows we may have different assumptions:)
My thoughts:
If it's in my inbox (whether on my physical phone, or hosted for me by a service provider), I own it and I get to control it regardless who sent it / how it got there (as long as other legal pre-requisites are met, i.e. not child porn etc)
If it's in my outbox, and I want to delete my account, THOSE instances of those artifacts should be removed, whether from my physical phone or by the service provider hosting them for me. If I've sent them to others, fair game, they own THOSE instances; but I expect the service provider to remove, upon my request, the artifact instances I solely own.
But I don't see any particular reason for where exactly the line between the two should be - why wouldn't it be that I could make anything I shared with you ephemeral, a-la Snapchat? And going back to email, it was actually MS Exchange who have supported the option to "Recall this message" [0] for many years, while gmail decided to not implement anything like that.
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/recall-or-replace...