Google will be deleting inactive google accounts together with all data on them starting December 1, 2023
Google will be deleting inactive google accounts together with all data on them starting December 1, 2023
A Google Account gives you Google-wide access to most Google products, such as Google Ads, Gmail, and YouTube, using the same username and password. An inactive Google Acco
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/545658
Inactive Google Account Policy
A Google Account gives you Google-wide access to most Google products, such as Google Ads, Gmail, and YouTube, using the same username and password.
An inactive Google Account is an account that has not been used within a 2-year period. Google reserves the right to delete an inactive Google Account and its activity and data if you are inactive across Google for at least two years.
Google also reserves the right to delete data in a product if you are inactive in that product for at least two years. This is determined based on each product's inactivity policies.
How Google defines activity
A Google Account that is in use is considered active. Activity might include these actions you take when you sign in or while you’re signed in to your Google Account:
- Reading or sending an email
- Using Google Drive
- Watching a YouTube video
- Sharing a photo
- Downloading an app
- Using Google Search
- Using Sign in with Google to sign in to a third-party app or service
Google Account activity is demonstrated by account and not by device. You can take actions on any surface where you’re signed in to your Google Account, for example, on your phone.
If you have more than one Google Account set up on your device, you’ll want to make sure each account is used within a 2-year period.
What happens when your Google Account is inactive
When your Google Account has not been used within a 2-year period, your Google Account, that is then deemed inactive, and all of its content and data may be deleted. Before this happens, Google will give you an opportunity to take an action in your account by:
- Sending email notifications to your Google Account
- Sending notifications to your recovery email, if any exists
Google products reserve the right to delete your data when your account has not been used within that product for a 2-year period.
December 1, 2023 is the earliest a Google Account will be deleted due to this policy.
I know this sounds dumb probably but 2 years is too short a time. Considering how email is basically the backbone of the Internet deleting old accounts after 2 years sounds nightmarish. People will be forever locked out of things. I even have like 6 Gmail accounts I use for different things. Like I’m going to have to login and rotate through them every now and again just to be sure.
Needs to be like five years or something considering they were presumably eternity before. You can still use Hotmail accounts.
If they recycle the email address so other people can use them that’s a whole other bag of worms. Like people.will find old email lists and try recreating them and seeing what they can get into. Expect your dead grandma to be suddenly posting on Facebook soon about great opportunities.
I get like emptying data out. Sure delete all their drive files and emails after 2 years but the account itself should never be.
Yeah, my gmail account is old enough to go buy beer at this point. It's no longer my primary email. I could see not logging into it for 5 years and then needing it to access some obscure service again.
As far as I'm concerned, by making gmail the default email service (to the point, by the way, that they WILL rate limit your business emails if you're self-hosting instead of using google suite or another major email provider) AND the default login method (through OAuth), they've taken up some new responsibilities. It's up to them to make sure that nobody ever loses their account or EVEN an email unless explicitly deleted.
I reckon maybe 50 years of inactivity would be enough to warrant an account deletion.
If I logged back into an account (in any system) I hadn't used in years and found it was gone, I wouldn't be that surprised. If I got into the account but found the information it held was gone, I'd be pissed. One is simple upkeep, the other feels like tampering.
That being said, if you haven't even accessed anything in an account in several years, why have it? The only thing I can think of where you wouldn't ever have accessed it (thereby keeping it alive in Google's definition) would be as archived storage. That's pretty dangerous to do in someone else's cloud, assuming it will be fine. Even active storage it's still recommended to have redundancy in backup locations.
I used some of those free websites years ago for storage and holding animation movies. They would have a policy of removing an account after only a month of inactivity. So while I was using them I'd make sure to log in regularly...I did not expect them to keep things around when I moved on to other things, it's why I copied the files I wanted to keep to other places locally.
if you haven't even accessed anything in an account in several years, why have it?
Email is a bit different to me than like cloud storage, because so much gets tied there -- social media, banking, etc., that I don't like the idea of gambling with it unless I'm sure an account is a throwaway. People incarcerated, hospitalized or dead may not be able to regularly access their email, yet the information inside may be vital to them and their family.
Ghoulish, but as I mentioned earlier, now I have to remind people to be sure to log into their dead relative's email accounts to preserve information.
Oh that's fucked up, that means really fucking old videos on YouTube could be lost.
YouTube's creator liaison, Rene Ritchie, clarified on Twitter that Google has "no plans to delete accounts with YT videos." https://arstechnica.com/google/2023/05/googles-new-inactive-account-policy-wont-delete-years-of-youtube-videos/
In other words, if you want to shield a long-dead account from deletion, post a few short YouTube videos of whatever content you like and you'll be safe until they decide to remove those accounts too.
thank god
Mmmm... Not sure if I believe him. I guess we'll find out once accounts start getting deleted.
Once an account is deleted will you be able to make a new account with the old email? This could be a security nightmare for old accounts tied to google email addresses.
Whoever snaps up Satoshi's email account will be one lucky bastard, though with our luck it'll be that douche Craig Wright.
I gave up completely on Google accounts after they kept flagging make-believe security issues and made it near impossible to verify that it's yours.
Even if you have a secondary email configured (and this would be what it's for) - but oh, no, that's still not good enough for them.
Then they pulled the utter bullshit of requiring your phone number "so they can make sure it's you" - but since there was never a phone number associated with the account, this is clearly nothing more than a data grab so they can associate real identities with their accounts.
That was the last straw for me, and I decided that their service was utter garbage, completely unreliable, and not worth using anymore.
And the enshittification continues.
Thanks for the heads up.
Maybe they got all the data they needed out of Gmail.
How does that work? Some emails are just for setting up access to things and are never used. Like gaming accounts, verification purposes etc. You would lose access to stuff you regularly use because you can't verify.
This would mean losing parts of your internet identity.
I've been trying to recover a Gmail account for years. Nothing I do will give me access.
How does this work for a google account that I've got linked in gmail to my standard google account? Is that classed as active or do I need to login to each one manually still?
Will that trigger accounts old.....myspace accounts for example to auto close/delete when they finally have invalid emails??? For science....
Not as any sort of domino effect, those sites won’t know it’s invalid and even if they get bounced emails most wont have an automated process to close the accounts, and certainly not delete them.
It will just obviously make it even harder to get back into them, or easier if google opens up that email as registerable now?
Wonder how many YouTube videos will be lost?
That’s good. Even for Google. They could potentially had ended up deleting popular videos, that brought in lots of ad money.
And the Enshittification of google begins ...
Begins?
Have you attempted to do a search in the last 3 years. It's unuseable these days essentially.
Maybe this is an internet inflection point. Reddit, Twitter, and now Google/Gmail death rattles heared around. What are some Google/Gmail decentralized alternatives? Some might be depressed, but I'm excited about this new possible internet! I love the idea of decentralized internet protocols! Back to origins of online communication without CEOs, shareholders, and large marketing firms all trying to squeeze us for every nickle and dime.
Oh that's fucked up, that means really old videos on YouTube have the potential to be deleted
***together with all data **