Updating our inactive account policies
blog.google
blog.google
2 years seems pretty reasonable to me for something provided by a for-profit corporation. And as other reporting has noted, they're not deleting YouTube videos (makes sense, since while nobody else views your e-mails, public videos are public).
People here are saying, what about if you go to jail for more than 2 years, or you're in poor health for multi-year stretches? Then pay for a cheap Google One subscription, export your data with Takeout, or have a trusted friend log in once a year. These are lots of options.
If this were a government-provided service then it would be one thing. But it's not, it's a for-profit company that gives you free products in exchange for ads. There are lots of options for keeping an account active. I see no reason why we should expect a company to keep providing storage for dormant accounts beyond 2 years though.
I simply forgot the account existed, and remembered one day to find a ton of amazing decade old photos.
There’s something to be said for doing things that earn your company respect from consumers. Had photobucket deleted my decade old photos because I didn’t log in frequently enough, I’d be pissed and wouldn’t use them in the future. If a small photo storage company can afford to keep customer photos for decade+ with no login, I hope Google can store some text emails for at least 5 years.
Re: the jail/health issue, making sure Google doesn’t delete my account would (literally) be the last thing on my todo list if I were on my way to prison or a coma.
Google is not being unreasonable in understanding that they can't afford to store all data from everyone indefinitely. They are not being unreasonable that it is a potential security risk.
Where they are being unreasonable is that they have basically gotten everyone addicted to their "free" product, and then, a decade after promoting the idea that no one should run their own services, they should just use free offers in the cloud: they are now admitting the downsides to this arrangement.
That Google account that your dead friend had that you keep on your buddy list because it gives you memories? Gone. That Facebook account with your dead family members photos and timeline? Gone. The Twitter account with all the tweets from you child who died too soon? Gone.
The lesson should be that if you're hoping for someone else to be the steward of all your digital histories, you're in for a bad time.
If you're on someone else's servers, you're bound by their rules, because much like going to their building, you are on their private property.
The thing is, they spent over a decade making sure that people trusted that their data would always be there, and that storing it in someone else's private property indefinitely, somehow, wasn't a problem.
It was always a problem. If you want to keep your data indefinitely, you have to know how to store it yourself on your own storage mediums that you keep in your own home and on your own computers/servers.
So, Google is currently doing nothing wrong, based on the realities of security and cost of data storage. The wrong they did was convincing users for over a decade that this wouldn't happen, knowing full well that eventually it would.
And unless you're the account owner, good luck archiving any of that. I believe Facebook is extremely hostile to scraping, and I don't think Twitter is very easy, either.
What now?
Photobucket doesn't even offer free service anymore. Isn't this proving the opposite of your point? They couldn't afford to do what you're asking, so they stopped.
Remember when Google said they would hold on to everything that their users did on their site forever? People were concerned about the privacy implications, etc. and how a part of their lives that maybe they didn't want anyone to know about would be out there, probably for sale, forever.
Well as far as I'm concerned Google made their bed and now they get to lie in it. Don't piss down my neck and tell me it's raining. They promised (or threatened, or noted) that they would hold onto it forever and that storage costs were manageable, etc. They need to be held to it.
In my case that means they get to archive all my junk mail (a few hundred emails with account info for places I might never visit again) since that is the sole purpose of my gmail account and I haven't intentionally used google search in years since DuckDuckGo showed up as an option.
This is actually funny to me. Life caught up with them and forever ended up being a much more normal, physically quantifiable time period that fit nicely in less than a human lifetime. But still, they should be forced to live up to their promises, or threats, etc.
Err, no, as a matter of fact I don't. Would you have a cite for this?
https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message... "Storage: Google believes people should be able to hold onto their mail forever. That’s why Gmail comes with 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of free storage – more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offer."
(at the time, I thought it meant forever, silly me)
There was nothing about saving all your emails forever no matter what even if you stopped using the product. It was never presented as a lifetime backup archive to be accessed decades later. Just tons more quota than competitors was all.
Nothing is forever. Any time any company is promising something that is "unlimited" or "forever", they're lying. They have to be, because the economics of holding true to infinities preclude them.
And set up Google Inactive Account Manager* so that in case you unexpectedly pass away, somebody you trust gets access to your account after a set period. I've set mine to 3 months because I'm online so much, but you may find 6 or 12 months to work better for you.
That being said I can not say I understand what is being conveyed in the original comment nor by yours.
Google at some point promised free storage of stuff, and for some reason these comments try to make it sound criminal that they are now backtracking on that, even if it is in the case of accounts that have not so much as twitched in two years.
If we were talking about a promise they had made to keep all your data (for which you pay them to keep) completely out of their ad business, and then years down the line that promise would get reversed, well then this line of reasoning would make sense.
They are a corporation giving free stuff. More shouldn't be needed for your spider sense to tingle.
Exactly. If I stop using their free services, do I stop seeing their ads though? Because that’s kind of required to make this argument work.
Or it’s just Google gets to delete my data because they have all the power in this relationship? I get to keep being fed ads, make Google money, lose my data, and cost Google less at the same time. There’s only one side of the relationship that benefits off any of this.
How would you be seeing their ads if you aren't using their services?
It is so big it is nearly a monopoly and it is part of our lives which is almost impossible to avoid. It should be regulated a lot more like a government and not treated like some kind of startup business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_Post
It's not just Americans who use gmail.
info which they already got, since the account is inactive, it is no longer contributing any new info. So why would they be paying for nothing?
I mean, they do have billions in profits so...
I understand it's a free service, that I'm not a paying customer, that I was wasting a resource by not actively using the service.
It's distressing to be given something by someone with power, to use the thing and in small ways rely on it and enjoy it, then suddenly it's taken away. I hope every inactive person gets their notices before they lose their data. I didn't for my Voice number and now I'm trying to sort out all the services I have tied to it.
Again, I understand Google has all the power. I had no leverage and shouldn't have had any expectations for how I'd be treated. However the amount of goodwill I have towards Google is rapidly approaching zero. I've read a thousand messages here saying variations of, "don't rely on Google, you will get hosed eventually". This (deleting inactive accounts with no option to opt out) is the kind of treatment that annoys people, eventually hurts them, and turns them off of a service.
> Your Google Voice number (xxx) xxx-xxxx will expire in 30 days
Sent by "voice-noreply@google.com".
I used to get emails from them: 2013-08-11 "Your Google Voice number --- has expired", 2021-04-11 "Your Google Voice number --- will expire in 30 days", 2021-11-06 "Your Google Voice number --- will expire in 30 days", 2021-11-30 "Your Google Voice number --- will expire in 7 days"
Nothing about expiring numbers since then. The last contact I had was: "2022-12-14 Notice: Verify your Google Voice forwarding phone --- in the next 30 days"
I haven't seen anything mentioning that, do you have a source for it? Old YouTube videos disappearing are my main concern from this policy change
> Starting later this year, if a Google Account has not been used or signed into for at least 2 years, we may delete the account and its contents – including content within Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar), YouTube and Google Photos.
This needs to be frontpage of HN for MUCH longer, this is honestly catastrophic. So much knowledge will be lost, imagine if public libraries started throwing books away if authors didn't publish any new books for 2 years.
This is insane from my perspective (though I see how it makes sense from Google's)
This needs to be talked about MUCH more, though even as I'm writing these words I doubt the utility of even discussing it - nobody except Google has the ability to even store all of this. Data hoarders are backing up Imgur prior to their purge... but Google is about to rip YouTube a new one. This looks insurmountable.
I vaguely remember Google promise not to delete your account in the era when they said they do no evil. That was before smartphone era and probably before their IPO.
At least for the first case, that assumes a lot of leeway in the justice system of a given country. Not everyone gets the SBF/Elizabeth Holmes treatment.
To say nothing of other risks, and the layering of other provider's kafka-esque policies. As an example, I have a few service accounts tied to a barely used gmail address. -Primarily- because those services [0] don't have a good/any way to move accounts between e-mails or merge accounts between two separate emails.
[0] - One of which is Sony, not exactly a bit player
Now as a secret unmentionable for any 2+ year sentence: lose access to all your google shit.
Could someone start a subscription paid service for the incarcerated - “we keep your accounts alive while you are inside”? More broadly, could provide other “manage your affairs for you while you are incarcerated” services. I suppose many incarcerated people would have no income or assets to pay for it, but some would, or their family might be willing to pay for it.
Google isn't the only provider that would need regular logins. Twitter, Twitch, etc. have account inactivity policies.
It's one more thing you have to know to think about - though if the system counts automated logins as logins, then maybe fetchmail has a purpose again.
What if the founder is a former inmate, and says “I wish there was something like that available when I was on the inside?”
Even if the business is officially classified as “for-profit”, there’s a big difference between a business seeking a living wage for its founders and employees versus one trying to make as much money as possible. In fact, it could even be owned by a charity - sometimes charities start 100% owned for-profit businesses, not because they want immense returns, but simply because sometimes the legal constraints on a charity can be too limiting, but a for-profit subsidiary isn’t subject to them
I have no interest in starting such a business myself, anyway.
Which strategy gives a better outcome for someone incarcerated today?
And in May 2033, you can lobby to keep the system broken so that you can maintain your business!
Businesses solve one problem, and one problem only: how to get money into the business owner's pockets.
Some businesses don’t even really want to make money; some intentionally lose it for tax purposes. :)
But seriously… in the course of doing business, businesses affect the world, which can indirectly lead to various impacts, some of which are good.
If you want to do something unambiguously good, do it, don't start a business.
> If you want to do something unambiguously good, do it, don’t start a business.
Oh? And what is unambiguously good? This seems like a rhetorical question, but it isn’t. Try to answer it.
## Ethics
It can be quite hard to know what is unambiguously good, depending on your ethics.
- If you are a consequentialist, you’d have to pick a time frame, and even then you won’t really know until that time comes.
- Other moral philosophies might focus only on intentions, but these are not plausible, because good intentions are easily derailed by ignorance.
- I don’t have a clear answer for myself, so I can be confident that some particular idea of “unambiguous good” will not hold water for N > 1.
## Opportunity Cost
Next topic… even if we agree on an act being “unambiguously good”, that isn’t enough. Even the most “obvious” selfless acts might not be the best considering the other options available. To phrase it as a question: considering your opportunity cost, is a small scale good action really worth it?
## Life has Tradeoffs
The phrase “don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good” is apropos here.
If you want to solve a particular disease with high likelihood, you could well find it demands collaboration with flawed pharmaceutical companies.
Is it worth it? Weigh it.
But to dismiss such an idea solely because it is “impure” —- without some meaningful metric that trades off pros and cons —- is foolish and unmoored from reality.
Hello over-the-top idealist, meet entropy. Time to talk about acceptance. Do what you can with what is available. Are you trying to make change or are you more interested in trying to look like a saint?
## Organizational Structure
Practically, if your desired good thing is attainable without using a for-profit business structure, great, consider that. It can work.
Personal actions matter. By all means, give smiles, encouragement, constructive criticism, love, advice, and so on. Beware: not all kindness (such as advice) will be taken as you intended! (Whoops. Maybe not unambiguously good anymore.)
Community organizing matters. Volunteers can go a long way. (But they aren’t perfect!)
When you want to scale up your impact, you have to accept real world tradeoffs. Not all are clear at the outset.
For-profit or not, you want a plan. Often that plan demands longevity and thus some kind of sustainability. Even if you are happy to spend your capital without an eye towards building an endowment, you’ll want to think about effectiveness.
Even if you are a charity, you might face some trade-offs about what donors you want to let in your tent. Very little money comes without any kind of expectation. The expectations might be clear and totally fair such as: transparency as to how your organization spends the money. Other expectations might less savory: donors wanting to prop up their image.
## A Footgun Named Naïveté
All in all, the comment above strikes me as naive to the point of undermining one’s own goals.
## Efficiency, Corruption, Impact
It is my view that:
- maximizing impact is hard to do without trading off some efficiency
- reducing corruption is non-linear. Rooting out the big offenders is essential to keeping an organization’s mission intact. From there, fighting corruption will be beneficial but often with diminishing returns.
- At some point, trust and acceptance of human weakness may actually be more cost effective than fighting the lingering forms of corruption; e.g. personal networks having some influence over a process that is supposed to be completely blind
- In many cases, people breaking the rules based on good information and intentions isn’t corruption at all. Sometimes the system is flawed and people work around it. Figuring out which is which costs time and resources.
> Businesses solve one problem, and one problem only: how to get money into the business owner's pockets.
I rebutted that by pointing out that businesses can and do solve other problems.
Are you changing your claim?
Initial motivations are irrelevant. At some point, the motivations of a business reduce to "make money", and anyone or anything that gets in the way of that doesn't matter, including your ethics and initial motivations.
There are lots of innocuous reasons why that happens. For example, you believe your business is doing good, right? So your business has to survive to keep doing good. And you need to make money to survive. So surely it's okay if you make it easy to pay for your service while you're in jail, perhaps by making deals with prisons to allow them to sign up in prison. Hm, that didn't work, prisons aren't doing it. Perhaps you can give prisons a cut of the sales for the service. And voila, now you're profiting from slave labor because the prisons just automatically deduct it from prisoner's pay, which is already below minimum wage, for work they can't opt out of. Of course you don't know that, so you hire 10 employees with your sudden influx of money and start expanding sales to more prison systems. And then you find out that your income stream is... not perfect, but now you've got a responsibility to your employees. McDonalds and JCrew do it, you're not doing anything worse than anyone else. And it's not exactly slavery--they're paid $1/hour (nevermind that a tampon in the commissary is $20). You're practically paying them, just with a service rather than money, right? And your business is doing good, so you have to do this, even if it's not perfect, so your business can survive and continue to do good!
The thing end-stage capitalist circles can't or won't understand is that if it's not this compromise, it's some other compromise or set of compromises. In any individual situation, doing good and making money might be compatible or incompatible, but there's only so many of those situations where you can choose good over money before your competitor knocks you out of the market.
"When you sit down in the studio to make money, God leaves the room." -Quincy Jones
I mentioned more details about it in another comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35967694
This has some overlap with the structures used by OpenAI and Mozilla, but unlike OpenAI, the Guardian doesn’t have any “capped profits”, 100% of profits go to the not-for-profit owner. There are employee salaries to pay, and likely also some debt interest, but those are an expense not a profit distribution
Ask yourself: are you trying to imagine a way of helping inmates retain access to their Google services, or are you trying to shoehorn a business into the much more obvious solutions to that problem?
This is a dumb business to create, not because it’s technically hard, or because it wouldn’t help some people, but because Google is one policy email away from making your business obsolete. If you get traction, they’re fairly likely to do that for the PR.
People make mistakes, go down the wrong path and go to jail if their wrongs are bad enough. That doesn’t mean they should have even more of a mine stripped road back to society.
And even if they didn’t, they have 2 *years* to have a friend/family to log in for them.
For a free service.
This is fake concern created by people that just want to be mad at google.
Don't rely on any cloud/SaaS provider to do that. Seriously.
Looks now like it is all going to be hosed anyway.
I hardly think it matters anyway. Take out "unexpectedly" and their complaint is exactly the same. Suggesting that someone who went to jail shoulda/coulda/woulda taken steps to avoid being locked out of their Google account is not practically different from victim-blaming.
Every year multiple people die in prison from preventable causes without ever being sentenced.
This is why bail reform is important. A well-off person can pay-away the bond and prepare to defend themselves. A poor person will be stuck, lose their job, home, important documents, pets, etc all before being found guilty. If they're found not-guilty, its simply their fault for being poor or being in the wrong place at the wrong time and there's zero recourse for these people having their life basically lit ablaze. Please don't take the anti-bail reform propaganda at face value, for every terrible outlier case, there are hundreds of people who don't have their life grenaded over a small charge.
Making people desperate is an easy way to increase crime.
US citizens aren't really protected by that promise either.
(1) sign up for Google Workspace subscription and then log a support ticket saying you want to migrate your old account to Workspace
(2) hire a lawyer and get them to write a letter to Google asking nicely. If that doesn’t work, you could have the lawyer escalate to threatening a lawsuit, filing a lawsuit, subpoenaing the account contents, asking for a court order that Google give you access to the account, etc - even if it turns out the law is on Google’s side not yours, they may decide to fold just to make the issue go away
(3) contact a journalist. Since you are a former prisoner, you’d need to find one with appropriate sympathies (pro-criminal justice reform, etc). If they make enough bad PR for Google, they may give you back your account in response. Probably depends also on what your conviction was, since some offenders the public finds it easier to sympathise with than others
None of those methods is guaranteed to work, but they all have potential. It really depends on how much you want that account back, and how much time and money are you willing to spend on it
I feel like people forget Hotmail et al. circa 2001 when 60 days passed and you lost everything. Sometimes you could keep your account and just the data was wiped out. This was ABSOLUTELY THE NORM on the internet. Google overturned it single-handedly.
In Texas my automatic payment for my storage garage where I have $10,000s of my designer clothing collection didn't go through because my bank removed overdraft payments and I missed the email. They made very little attempt to contact me, pathetically little in my opinion, and when I finally caught it barely 30 some days later they said my possessions were all days away from going to auction. It really disgusted me. My whole life is stored there since going nomadic.
They don't have a prepay option otherwise I'd gladly pay annually or biannually to play it safe. Based on the US culture, I believe it is their actual goal to take possession of all my things. My only copy of school yearbooks and college degrees are also there. I really doubt any other country is as hostile and would love to move it all to my storage in Thai or France if not for customs and import taxes complications.
I didn't use my Hong Kong subway card for 9 years and the balance was still there, in America at almost 0 cost to them to keep it active, the NY subway system 100% would have stolen my money. I fundamentally HATE whan the culture tolerates as normal. Google ain't bad at all.
MetroCards expire every 12 months, but every MVM in the city (and every subway station has 2-50 of them) will take an expired one and exchange it for an active one for free. My understanding of the expiry window is that it's meant to correspond roughly to how long a MetroCard survives in a wallet, not to steal your money.
(None of this will matter in a few years anyways, the replacement system integrates with existing contactless payment systems.)
Auctioning off unpaid units is both a liability thing (there is a clear process for the eviction so units can be turned over) and a bonus revenue source. Literally every storage place has it buried in their terms somewhere.
Oddly enough, when I get checks I just blow them up on my screen, sign in Paint with my mouse, and take a photo in my bank app of my screen to deposit. It actually freaking works
Decent places allow you to prepay, have multiple payment options, etc because they also don’t want to deal with auctioning.
FWIW, most Octopus cards do expire eventually. If you don’t use it for three years, it’ll be deactivated and they’ll deduct a $15-per-year admin fee until either your balance is gone or you reactivate the card.
The only way to avoid this is to have a special concession card (seniors, kids, etc) or to buy an Octopus outright[1], which most people don’t do. The tourist Octopus, notably, can only be bought outright.
1. https://www.octopus.com.hk/en/consumer/customer-service/faq/...
In my neck of the woods these are typically big banks and security services companies.
Wontonly executing people for non crimes related to drugs yeah.
For example, one Gmail account I maintain for my deceased partner has another older Gmail account delegated to it. I have the credentials for the newer account, but not the older account. That delegated access is the only way I can get at about 10 years of their life; since I can't login to the account, I can't run a Google Takeout on it, I can't pull it via IMAP, etc.
(I'm sure it turned some heads when I logged back into their Twitter account, which became their de facto public online memorial after death, to prevent Twitter from deleting it as inactive.)
All of my efforts to recover actual capital-A Google Account access to the delegated account have been either declined or ignored by Google because I'm not the account owner — which, obviously, because I'm not dead. I've offered them death certificates and small-estate proof, but they don't want it or seem to care. Since I can't login to the account, I can't prove activity on it, so this means one day in December that'll just be it. 10 years of correspondence, wedding planning, travel plans, memories straight down the shitter. (Google already "lost" all of the photos in that account that were more than 10 years old; cf. other complaints: https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/jgr0j9/help_missing_....)
If you want content from a dead person's account, you have to get a court order, and then only if Google accepts your request, which they probably won't: https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/6357590?h...
Judging from the contents I think it consumes about 150MB of storage. I'd pay quite a lot to get that account dumped onto a $10 thumb drive so I can back it up. I'd already printed out a binder full of it, which is comical considering it's fucking _email_.
Anyway — figure out your digital estates while you're awake and alive because it gets way harder — for everyone, much less you — once you're incapacitated or dead.
All this does is tell the spammers exactly how long they are going to be allowed to have 'sleeper accounts' for, the problem won't magically go away.
With LLMs it suddenly became much easier. I suspect that the timing of this decision might be not random.
I am reasonably confident that Google are more aware of what's going on with dormant accounts on their platform than you are. I previously worked at Google in Security and while it wasn't in user protection, I know they have quite a few signals for determining compromise. It's pretty trivial to see that an account that was in legitimate use for 5 years and then dormant for 5 vs one that was created and left dormant for 10.
Yes, on Google and on other platforms, account age is a valuable reputation signal but it isn't the only one.
Google deals with abuse creation accounts in the tens of millions.
Especially given you're talking of "thousands" of accounts, I suspect whatever problems mattered to you the most were not the same as those of Google's account system.
They mention this being mostly about security and preventing the use of hacked accounts, and they mention these dormant accounts that were only created and then went immediately dormant. It makes sense to me that they are in fact talking about this issue, just not explaining all the detail.
If the only indicator you have for spam potential is [created an acccount] + [was inactive for some period], I can't imagine the other myriad spam vectors aren't getting hammered 24/7.
I wouldn't discredit it so quickly. I have seen lots of old accounts being taken over on eBay lately for scam auctions. It seems to become more and more common. So this could very well happen with Google accounts as well. It makes them more credible for whatever scammy thing they are being used for.
Previous company I worked for had to create a process to clean up unused developer accounts. The fact that they were free to sign up meant we eventually got quite an impressive amount of them.
This is great news! I have a couple of Google accounts that I couldn't delete because I lost the login credentials. I appreciate that Google will go ahead and do that for me.
My password manager has accumulated hundreds of accounts, many for services I haven't used for years. Probably half of them are "one off" accounts that I had to create because the stupid web site makes you create an account to do some basic thing (that shouldn't require an account). So here all these accounts are, sitting out there probably with my real name and maybe a few other bits of PII in them, just waiting to get p0wned. At one point I started going through them one by one logging in to look for a "Delete Account" button but surprisingly most of them offer no way to do so, or hide it well.
Even HN doesn't let you delete your account. I understand they will if you E-mail them, but even then, I don't think they will delete your content.
The web needs to be more ephemeral. It by default retains too much "forever and just because".
The number of people on the earth grows exponentially. Babies can subsidize dead people.
Google wins by limiting account hijacking, cutting hosting costs, and the only people who care are some complainers on Hacker News who will stop caring the moment they get distracted by the next Framework laptop cup holder attachment.
It’s a tricky problem. Is it still “your” content after other people build possibly large conversations on it?
Note the may. It is not a guarantee that they will delete!
I was hoping that some day, someone would register that phone number and I'd be able to convince them to give me an authentication code, but it sounds like now the account will be deleted before this happens.
This really sucks because I think that email was used to register with a bitcoin exchange that I may have some (formerly) tiny balance on. So effectively google has locked me out of an account that could have financial consequences, with no way for me to recover it.
Unless you got to know them well (as in personally face to face), a stranger asking for a 2fa code would appear to be an elaborate phishing campaign.
What they are really doing is signing up for stuff using your phone number.
If someone ever asked me to send them a 2fa I would send them the wrong one until they get mad and stop asking me to do it.
Also, my name is google-able and some "white pages" style sites still list my old phone number, so I could verify my identity in other ways.
You'd be surprised what people will do if you talk them into it, lots of people wouldn't hesitate to give their own credentials up, they're not going to take issue giving a 2fa code for something they're not in the process of signing into.
This isn't a silicon valley area code or any other area where people are tech-savvy, I'd wager there's a 99% chance that whoever registers the number could be persuaded. I can literally have my family with the same (rare) last name meet them face to face.
But also, can you register a specific U.S. number as a person in another country? Seems like a lot of hassle and possibly more expensive than $30, if it's even possible.
I have a very old youtube account which I can't recover, in fact there's 2 of them. They have content on them that I will never be able to reproduce, but I watch it from time to time for nostalgia.
This post means that Alphabet will delete old legacy content on a huge scale. The world will be poorer for their culture. It will lose the ability to watch very old youtube videos.
https://libredirect.github.io/
I noticed that when you access YouTube videos through this you can just right click and download.
Conversely, if you take the advice of some to set up a personal domain for your email, you are basically committing to a lifetime obligation. If you later change your mind and let that domain expire, any future owners of that domain will receive any email that was sent to your old addresses.
Same way I may buy a home & get mail. Tomorrow if I sell that home I need to do change my address with senders, and make sure to put forwarding (maybe keep the old domain for few weeks/ this year)
You can set up a forward to your new email, and keep the old address active and forwarding messages until you're satisfied you've updated (or canceled) all the uses of your old address.
Then maybe start bouncing messages for a period of time before you finally shut down your domain.
I definitely have some Google accounts from like 10 years ago that I lost access to. I'm glad to know they'll be deleted.
That being said, 2 years does seem a little short.
But, I do like the idea of my data expiring. It seems creepy as hell that someone could go back 10 years and dig up a bunch of information about you that you forgot existed: blog posts, comments, photos, videos, emails, home addresses, phone numbers, credit cards.
Data breaches happen. Data brokers find your stuff. Stalkers exist.
I haven't seen this mentioned in the thread and worth doing for some peeps. I set this up so after 6 months of no activity my sister and wife get access to my accounts.
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en
Quite useful if you die or become incapacitated etc so emails, files and photos etc can be kept as needed.
I recently turned <significant milestone>, and had a death in the family who was nearly 100 and had their estate in order which made things a lot less complicated their executor and kin.
We now have Enduring Power of Attorney and Enduring Guardian delegated to each other plus two other well trusted people, one local and one distal, jointly and severally; and set up our wills.
So our lives now have a trusted back-up operator and a redant pair of back-up operators. N+3.
Don't wait till it's too late.
This is not legal advice. I am not a lawyer, and I am especially not your lawyer.
Of course that would require some kind of functional consumer-oriented support line where a human working at google could receive identifying information, check that against Google's internal records and public databases (your old phone numbers, addresses, etc) and check against the contents of the account and the old logs in order to determine that the person was who they said they were.
That would also solve the problem of so many people in the comments who have old google accounts that they've lost the 2FA/passwords to who are locked out of their accounts, they'd now have a process to go through in order to prove who they are and that they owned the account and get it back.
But that would cost Google a lot more money than just even hanging onto the storage, so they're gonna nuke it and make it all go away.
Big Tech really needs to be regulated more like a government agency.
This is a highly unreliable, easily gamed non-solution to the problem. If people are determined enough to compromise your accounts, it's easy enough for them to find your old phone numbers, addresses, etc. Websites like https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/ exist, and it provides generally accurate information on people.
Humans are always the weakest link. If you allow a random person to convince a Google employee that are the owner of the account, they are going to be tricked.
People on HN are always very quick to come to the conclusion that Big Tech not doing something is because of cost, whereas the reality is that the thing HN commenter proposes but Big Tech is not doing is flawed in the first place.
> At the moment, Google is not planning to delete accounts with YouTube videos. (That would be tricky as some old abandoned clips might have historical relevance.)
[0]: https://9to5google.com/2023/05/16/google-account-delete/
It feels like a small leap to go from deleting a person's photos, documents, and emails to deleting their videos.
Deleting private content and deleting public content are two entirely different things. There's zero reason why the former would imply the latter, and many reasons why it wouldn't.
Archive everything.
This is what this policy announcement says.
People should use this as a warning to save content they want to keep from YouTube that's particularly old and the account seems abandoned. Just in case Google isn't so lenient with the generous solution; unlinking YouTube accounts but keeping the video up.
Disk space is cheap, and it can be nice to scroll through the folder now and then and rediscover some great content.
I'll be rolling on the floor laughing the day that Google deletes all the old videos, though. The amount of internet entrusted to Alphabet is just hilarious.
Interesting two weeks. RIP pushshift. Your torrents live on. Congratulations, imgur – photobucket, tinypic, and imageshack would be proud.
There needs to be legislation for this kind of thing.
Another problem: emails on my old account need to be transferred over. That's the only reason why I need the old account. But there is no simple way to do this. And two accounts cannot be merged either. I have been using a ninja technique that adds something like a Hotmail address as a sign in. Takes out the email data. And then deletes the email account. And then creates a new one. And then reuploads the emails. Annoying as hell. The Hotmail address is the only way my login method remains.
At least some time ago there used to be some wonkiness regarding replies to calendar invitations if somebody sent an invitation to my private mail and I would then accept or decline that invitation via my calendar on my regular Google account, which is linked to a google-specific mail address. So ultimately I ended up creating a secondary Google account for my private mail address and then delegated full calendar access from there to my main account, which is also the one signed-in on my phone.
Data can be deleted, but if gmail addresses can be reused in just 2 years that is rather short...
Otherwise, you need to sign in on those accounts every so often, but they are essentially empty.
===
Hi there,
We've noticed that you haven't used your Gmail account, XXX@gmail.com, for quite some time. In order to make Gmail better for our users, we've added a lot of things in the last few months and we hope you'll want to start using your account again. Here are just some of the latest additions:
- Free POP access: Take your messages with you. Download them, read them offline, access them using Outlook, your Blackberry or any other device that supports.
- More free storage (today and tomorrow): Stop worrying about storage. Your account now has over 2000 megabytes of free storage and our plan is to continue growing your storage by giving you more space as we are able.
- 12 more languages: The Gmail interface is now available in UK English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and simplified and traditional Chinese. If you don't see the language you want on this list, look for it in the future because we're going to keep adding more.
- Rich text formatting: Express yourself with fonts, bullets, highlighting and over 60 colors of the rainbow.
- And lots more, including support for more browsers, an improved Contacts list, and an easier way to send photos.
We're still working hard every day to build you the best email service around. But to keep Gmail great for our users, we may have to close inactive accounts after 9 months. So, we hope you'll give us another chance. To log in to your Gmail account, just visit: http://gmail.google.com.
Thanks, The Gmail Team
== We sent you this message because we wanted to warn you of your account's inactivity and remind you of our dormant account policies. For more details, please visit our Help Center:
http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6563
*Protect your Gmail password and your personal information*
Google takes your privacy and security very seriously. For your protection, Google will never ask you for your personal information, such as bank accounts numbers, credit card numbers, pin numbers, passwords, or Social Security numbers in an email. For more information on how to protect your Gmail password and your personal information, visit our Help page here: http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8253
We sent you this message because as part of signing up for a Gmail account, you agreed to be periodically asked for your comments and suggestions to improve Gmail. If you do not wish to provide such feedback in the future, you may opt-out of receiving Gmail market research messages by visiting: XXX
(If clicking the URLs in this message does not work, copy and paste them into the address bar of your browser)
Yes, I know there's many other costs but I'm talking about * PER GB * and just for storage not access. A disk drive roughly takes the same amount of space/power/cooling regardless of capacity, so if you install 2x larger drives then cost ** PER GB ** should fall in half. And yet, we haven't seen that among cloud providers.
This should mean that inactive accounts quickly drive to near-zero cost, since they're nothing but storage capacity. Photo hosting should drive to zero. etc etc etc
Can anyone explain ??
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/2....
https://blocksandfiles.com/2021/01/25/wikibon-ssds-vs-hard-d...
The company trajectory and the fact that there doesn't seem to be any support for this sort of thing is why I'm ultimately un-googling my current accounts, documents, etc.
Edit: The kicker is that I get security notifications about the failed login attempt at the recovery email, so I know they could send recovery information to that address. I trusted them to use the "recovery email" for account recovery when issues like this occur and now that basic trust is gone. It's been said over and over, but this is all another reason not to build your online identity around Google.
That said, this policy change makes me really concerned about how difficult it is to run your own email solution that people trust. Today's email ecosystem feels very focused on Gmail and those accounts just became more ephemeral.
My impression is that these are very much open questions.
Ah yes, because as we all know, the best way to prevent a robbery is to preemptively burn down the whole building. Good luck stealing from me once all my belongings have been turned to ash!
---
To be a bit more charitable, it may true that in some cases, getting hacked is worse than just having your account deleted. I'd posit this is the case for a small minority of users, especially when the overall chance of being hacked is still far from 100%.
By the way, what about accounts that do have two-factor authentication enabled? Are those exempted?
If Google wants to delete inactive accounts, that's their prerogative, but don't hide behind some security argument.