[Gigachad]

There’s also no indication Google wants to wind down Gmail. This change just looks like an aggressive method to stop bots and spammers.

[soraminazuki]

It also happens to be convenient for data mining, which happens to be the case for every single security measure that Google takes. It's almost as if Google is doing everything it can to undermine people's privacy, and the occasional security benefits are just side effects of that.