Google is deleting inactive accounts. Here's what that means
npr.org
npr.org
> That's because the tech company says it "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."
Put all your data in "the cloud", give up control, and be subjected to the whims of big tech. It would be cool to know when the above was sneaked in to the ToS. As a normal person, I'm getting pretty sick of the deal changing every day. I can run my own server for everything (and do), but most people I know can't because the tech industry refuses to build anything decent that "just works" locally.
As for the above quote, every photo should be governed by the ToS that was active when the photo was uploaded. Adhesive ToS strategies should be illegal.
Personally I'm happy that he doesn't include me in the set of shirkers to be blamed.
Somehow not only is the computer still on(How? shouldnt a power outage have turned this off at some point?), but the server still is working perfectly.
I genuinely don't understand, but its recording sound and temp data as we speak. To be fair, I did mess around in 2021 to ensure things were robust since I was working on an Embedded project at the time.
I try but I wish I could make more people understand the implications of this. If your data is in any "cloud", it is entirely at the whim of those companies whether you can lose access permanently at any moment.
For any data that you actually care to be able to access in the future with some reasonable assurance, you must have either a local copy in your control or an enterprise-level support contract with SLAs with the cloud provider. The latter is expensive so for personal use of personal data, local copy is the only practical answer.
If a significant number of users were willing to pay for this, I’d gladly build it… evidence would suggest that very few people actually care strongly enough to open their wallets though :(
2 years is a long time to not login to a single Google service given their reach, let alone the one that might have data like Drive. Speaking on principal, not reality , for a free service that costs the end user $0 and the provider >$0 makes absolutely no sense to complain.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38421162
It's cultural movement and social discourse, memory of many that's been lost.
Plus, if an account is associated with a phone number, it will help with account takeover issues.
That said, not a fan of forcing 2FA if people don't want it.
I was under the impression they would. If not what's the point?
To crack down on abuse, they try to force the affected users to become aware of their accounts.
Everything in your wallet is yours, it doesn't change unless you make the change. No-one can decide what the contents do or what they are, how they watch you or report your behaviour. The contents of a wallet are free.
None of that seems to have anything to do with a digital ID.
Ip68 is a mere 1.5 meters! It’s still a dystopia until we get iso6425.
Then the next day I read a report on how they’d just dished out someone’s existing mobile number to a new customer!
The same number now registered twice on the network.
Mobile numbers as auth are a disaster.
A convenient disaster however.
Just call the police.
> You'll have to take an extra step if you want to hold on to content from a specific product that you haven't used in some time. If you want to keep photos from your Google Drive, for example, it's best to sign in to that particular service.
> That's because the tech company says it "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."
I fail to understand why one needs to access every service on the platform to avoid losing data. All of them are tied to one Google account. Logging in to one (like Gmail) should ensure that Google Drive data shouldn’t be deleted. This is just stupid policy!
Large companies offering ad-supported “free” products cannot and must not be trusted. If you have some money and time, you can choose a different provider for email. Pick from (in no particular order) runbox.com, posteo.de, mailbox.org or mailfence.com. They’re quite cheap compared to other popular paid email providers and also support IMAP so that you can own your data and migrate if needed. If you need a lot of mailboxes for a fixed price, you can try migadu.com or mxroute.com (the latter hosts data in the U.S.).
For other services, the migration path is either complex and/or costly or impossible. Still, moving out should be explored.
One doesn't. That's just NPR's insane interpretation of "reserving a right" meaning that your data is definitely going to be deleted on a per-service basis. If they ever started actually doing it, there would be multiple notifications over months if not years about "your data in service X will be deleted unless you do Y".
NPR did not say or imply this.
> just NPR's insane interpretation of "reserving a right" meaning that your data is definitely going to be deleted on a per-service basis. If they ever started actually doing it, there would be multiple notifications over months if not years about "your data in service X will be deleted unless you do Y".
Where did Google state this?
I have forgotten accounts popping up left and right in my gmail. And Ive also been recovering a bunch of accounts that spammers or bots managed to create using my emails as recovery addresses - that are now getting sign in warnings. Ive been able to take over those too.
Oh right, let's prevent a minority of people losing their accounts by making 100% of them lose their accounts.
There's so much unintentional data loss here, people who are going to be so sad and mad. The shared photos grandma sent us a decade ago will all just die. Those of us tending deceased accounts will have to forever juggle a yearly ritual of carefully logging in to all relevant services. Eventuslly time will win and Google will delete the enduring digital part of our family trees. This is such a monstrous shitty awful turn.
So far the Google graveyard has largely been Google projects. It's such a darker more bitter twist to me that Google is trying to put some of the enduring surviving bits of grandma in the grave too. What an wretched twist from 2023.
One silver lining of this is that non-tech people are becoming aware of the arbitrary and capricious nature of policies at Google.