Inactive Google Account Policy
support.google.com
support.google.com
Overall I think this is reasonable. I can't see why people are upset, when the general burden to make it "live" is low.
There are specific corner case problems: people who cannot login for various reasons, can't get Google humans to help, and who get mail forwarded so are limping along. And, there are a surprisingly high number of people who seem to trip up over account recovery. If I had one criticism of google here, it's that they're judge, jury and executioner. There's no appeal mechanism for ordinary mortal. It's capricious, sometimes squeaky wheels get oiled, sometimes not.
I pay for google 1 and I takeout periodically.
Don't depend on "free" for critical functions.
This part is unreasonable no? I sometimes don't use a product for a while, like google drive for instance, and the prospect of coming back to it and discovering that all my data has been deleted is a bit on the dreadful side. I don't want to have to keep track of which product Ive been using and how long since I last signed into all the time.
If you expect to get something served to you for free forever, Google has a bridge to sell you.
Though either way, my point stands: If you value Google storing your data, pay for it. If you don't, that implies you don't actually care about your data because you refused to place any explicit value on it.
If it's the "delete data" part, I can see why a company might not serve a piece of data in perpetuity when an user appear to have abandoned it, unless we want the company to assume ownership of that data.
All the cards are stacked against the users though. It's not that easy for a non-tech person to use any sort of email/photo library etc that isn't free from Google/Apple etc.
Even self hosting email is impossible now. You won't be able to send emails because nothing trusts you.
If Google intentionally incentivized everyone to move their entire digital lives into their platform for profit, they should have some sort of responsibility for that. There have absolutely been significant impact to people's lives because they've gotten locked out of their account for reasons that even Google can't explain, and there is no recourse or action they can take.
I definitely think they should have better account recovery process, if need be for $, prove identity and get your data as takeout if they want to decline service but I would be amazed if any part of the current agreement we make with them could be said to obligate it.
As a defacto monopoly I do tend to think they should be made to have some process. Which jurisdiction?
It's even worse. When it was publicized that Google wrongfully flagged multiple accounts and tipped the police for child porn, they refused to reinstate those accounts. Instead, they chose to retaliate by further defaming the account owners on the record. That was after the police cleared their names and they haven't made a single apology to this day.
Another line of reasoning i see frequently is "you don't know all the material facts" which is of course also almost always true. So the original complainant may have multiple things going on, may have been abusive, using facilities otherwise for commercial gain against T&C, had innocuous but IPR abusing files, you name it. None of this would ordinarily trigger lockout. Google just avoid having to say sorry and re-enable by handwaving "other reasons" statements.
Got a second parallel email server last year.
Mailinabox. A cheap vps.
I had trouble one time when I stupidly used my email as credentials for local testing SMTP server, I was banned for like a day. Had to send an appeal to spamhaus or something.
Other than that, it has been pretty smooth sailing.
That's not been my experience - I've successfully self-hosted email for nearly a decade now.
Really nice guide here: https://thomas-leister.de/en/mailserver-debian-stretch/
Not that there are zero issues, in particular if you set up a brand new mail server with zero reputation, it can take a while to get yourself out of the hole.
I think for normal people though it makes a lot more sense to just pay for email. I'm not sympathetic at all to someone who complains about the quality of service of free Gmail. You are the product, so for the ten millionth time, it's going to suck for you somehow. Fastmail costs 3 bucks a month, if you have 3 bucks, go buy it, it's better (or buy one of their many decent competitors).
https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-...
It's impossible to self host with the guarantee most emails sent from that host won't be outright rejected or flagged as spams by centralised mail services.
IP/domain reputation is also probably an issue; I’ve been using the same IP address and domain names for over a decade so services like Talos are reasonably satisfied I’m harmless. If someone sets up a server and it has never sent mail for their domain before—or, worse, they get a radioactive IP address—it may be hard to become accepted by other email providers.
I get the sense that the relative lack of trouble I have maintaining a mail server is more to do with being effectively grandfathered in and worry that if I ever have to shift away from my current provider that email sending is going to become a lot harder since I won’t have my IP reputation any more.
Yet that is exactly what so-called "tech" companies enable, and arguably encourage, millions of people to do. They certainly do not discourage people from using their websites and apps, for any purpose, from what I have seen. That would make no sense. Imagine Google showing a warning along the lines of "Do not use Gmail for important purposes." Instead the message might be "Here is something to enhance security". These companies have conflicts of interest vis-a-vis computer users. It's like an opioids company tasked with preventing addiction. The best they can do is promote treatment of addiction. This is a poor analogy because selling drugs is regulated. Handing out free email accounts, in order to conduct commercial surveillance, is not.
People have email addresses linked up to all kinds of other accounts. Sometimes my only way into an old non-Google account is a gmail address I made a long time ago. Often there is no way to change the email address linked to an account.
It's not free at all, Google uses every bit of data you reveal to them to power their ad business. It's a form of payment even if we don't talk about it this way.
This line of thinking also reveals an explanation for this new "Inactive Account" policy. Google doesn't care to keep old data — one needs to either feed them new signals they can sell / use to train their AIs or else... your account gets deleted.
Also reading this closely there's separate timers per product? This is worse than making sure my domains aren't going to expire...
Probably not. I think the point is to ensure there's human interaction. Don't expect any automated activity to affect the timer.
> Reading or sending an email
I would need to actually mark incoming emails as read?
For those who don't know, you can have multiple Google sessions in different Firefox containers in a single Firefox profile/window.
This is an official Firefox adding as far as I know. It works with Firefox sync for me (not enabled by default).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
You don't have to speculate here. They clearly say "Activity might include these actions you take when you sign in or while you’re signed: Reading or sending an email, Using Google Search, etc."
So it's not just "did they log in".
100% not. I have a bunch of Google Accounts (not even with a Gmail inbox attached) that just forward on email alerts from Google Ads, etc. And have been getting these update emails since July 14th.
Solid suggestion. Of course, capricious Google could always change their mind tomorrow, but it is something actionable.
> Your Google Account contains a gift card with a monetary balance.
So, all I need to do to keep a Google Account active indefinitely is just link an unspent $10 gift card to the account? Sweet!
Plus, email is your everything now. Its your login, its your invoice book.
> Sending email notifications to your Google Account
> Sending notifications to your recovery email, if any exists
Further up it says that reading an email counts as being active.
So if you have IMAP access does that count when you simply read that email?!
I have gmail accounts with IMAP that haven’t logged into the web interface in years. I can’t be the only one in this boat. This is very ambiguous and troubling.
Before that inevitably happens, there will probably be a point we all have to switch over to identification not by user selected username but random alphanumeric ID string, with display names only for search, free from uniqueness requirements and somehow impersonation resistant. A lot of social media actually uses such ID in the backend/for internal uses(variable length primary key!? Of course not!), maybe it’s time frontend experiences think about that, too.
[1] Not my primary account but I got it to give Gmail a try when it was first opened to the public. I personally found it 'meh' but kept the account for testing purposes with my own email server.
It has turned out to be a monkey's paw wish, though. I get medical records, legal filings, private and personal correspondence, bills, everything. Trying to contact anyone involved to let them know that I'm not the me they think I am barely works. It's both maddening, and bizarre to me that so many people don't know their own email address, for genuinely important stuff.
I disagree, there is a solution out there, it's just more work because the client-software has to be smarter. We can take inspiration from how our meat-space society functions, where everybody maintains their own contextual aliases as metadata, something that can be personalized or shared.
For example, imagine we have a big global commenting site, and my own metadata says "Terr_ believes ID 49985189215 is Bob Smith."
When I ask the software to contact "Bob Smith", it knows who I mean from that mapping. When I publish something for other people to see and add a special reference to Bob Smith, it contains "{49985189215 which author knows as "Bob Smith}". People who already know 49985189215 as "Bobby Smith" would see that pop up on their screen instead, and the rare few which have a conflicting "Bob Smith" would see it rendered differently, making it obvious I don't mean their Bob Smith.
It gets more complex though when you consider the same user with multiple contexts: "I'll call Bob" at home might easily be a totally different person than "I'll call Bob" in the workplace.
I think Google never recycles usernames due to security reasons:
https://support.google.com/mail/thread/48938290
https://twitter.com/Google/status/974054535974006784
Maybe you are suggesting that this policy is about to change?
They say I have no right to my data since I can't log into the account, but I don't think the law works that way. I have a right to my data, they are entitled to give it to me if I can prove I am who I say I am, which I can.
Google had no ability to speak to a human, and don’t care about me or you in the slightest.
I wanted to get my data out, and there are various laws in various jurisdictions that require this ability. Because of this Google was forced to provide tech support via phone to help you get your data out. Believe me, I've spent a lot of time arguing with those folks. They do have access to some sort of internal email/phone directory though with lots of interesting contacts they are willing to give you to get you off the phone, but I've not had success yet with any of them.
You certainly don't want anything important like your retirement account to rely on something transient like your isp email, or even a paid email from some smaller company that you might forget to pay on time one year, or they just decide they don't like you for not even necessarily anything you did.
So you use gmail or hotmail etc, not because they are free, because they arre presumed to outlive everything else, and be safer because of that. And that much is completely true and not a mistake.
There are a few really bad things on a collision course here that hasn't been properly dealt with at a society/regulation level yet:
* gmail, and email in general, is not an inconsequential thing like a Spotify account, or like email when it was new and nothing important in life depended on it yet. Life-critical things depend on it now. There are many things now where your email is the ultimate way a service provider knows you. There is no office you can go to to clear up any kind of account error as an ultimate option.
* Yet, providers are allowed to TREAT it as a trivial inconsequintial thing.
* google absolutely is responsible for actively drawing people to use gmail and become dependant on gmail and other google services. It isn't good enough to say they don't make anyone, they do actively pursue it. Same goes for others not just google.
* too many consequential things are allowed accept mere email and login credentials as the only form of proof of identity without an equivalent for the ultimate option you always used to have for any possible thing: "Go down town to the credit union office and present myself and my drivers license and my birth certificate, or 20 other people from the community who all simply say "yeah that's her, I'm even the doctor who delivered her, and she's even your own siter in law so you know she was married to the house owner, so give her her house deed even though the husband died in the war last year and the town clerks office burned down and no one can produce the piece of paper now"
I don't know what I would do if betterment.com decided not to honor my login or I couldn't repond via either of the two email addresses on file. It's 2 different addresses from two different providers, but even 2 is still only 2. If one can break, two can break. So much of my life's resources all hinging on something so flimsy. This is not robust. Now multiply that by x billion other people, most of whom are not aware how fragile their access to these important things is, and how little they can do about it if they are unlucky and have a problem.
I would absolutely not consider a free account on anything to outlive a paid product. Quite the opposite: If I'm not paying for any kind of SLA, written in an agreement, I assume the account in question is temporary, could disappear at any moment, and treat it as such: Never rely on it for anything where you'd be screwed if you suddenly got locked out.
There have been so many, many, many, many of these "I got locked out of my free Xyz account with no appeal possible!!" stories, I'm shocked that people still rely on them. And if you say, well, you shouldn't have put your 401(k) retirement account behind that E-mail address, they call you victim blaming. People, your free account is worth what you pay for it.
What if the account is secured by 2FA? Are you advocating to disable 2FA for the sake of your automated continuity of the account?
The reason I now use gmail and not hotmail is because Microsoft did a similar thing 20 years ago. When I lost my hotmail account, I thought I might as well use gmail from now on. Reason I didn't log into my hotmail account was because I used the mail address I got from the university.
Just buy a book, movie, game, or a subscription of some sort and it won't go inactive ever.
I can't help but feel that they're slowly turning into a Yahoo though, given this policy and their now terrible search results.
Time changes.
Call me suspicious, but reserves the right and may be deleted to me says that they may not actually have plans of deleting the account data outright. Maybe they just can't even guarantee being able to completely wipe all the associated account data. I think they could have the external appearance of having deleted the account with no real internal change.
Oh and here's a question. If they delete an account, and then someone goes in and registers the same name, then what? Talk about an opportunity for further account hijacking (for example, password recovery from old logins). To prevent this, presumably they would still at least maintain a record that the account previously existed and cannot be registered again.
In an email they sent