Key highlights
- Google to delete inactive accounts from December 2023
- Accounts that haven’t been used in two years might get deleted
- Google will send notifications prior to deleting accounts
Starting December 2023, Google may automatically erase accounts for users who haven’t used them in the previous two years. On the company’s The Keyword blog, Google today disclosed a modification to the company’s dormant account policy. Ruth Kricheli, VP of Product Management at Google, disclosed the modification on the website.
Inactive Google accounts are frequently less secure than those of active accounts. These dormant accounts can have weaker passwords from earlier times and lack multi-factor authentication security. Google estimates that the danger of abuse for accounts without two-factor authentication is up to ten times higher.
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Google intends to start with unused accounts and then broaden the selection of accounts from there. According to Google, different teams would notify account owners “over the months leading up to the deletion”. Notifications will be sent to account email addresses and also to recovery addresses.
When a Google account is deleted, all related data is also deleted, including any posted, made, or shared files, videos from YouTube, photos from Google Photos, emails from Gmail, documents from Google Drive, and anything else.
Also Read: Gmail Tips And Tricks: How To Secure Your Google Account With Two-Factor Authentication
How Users May Keep Their Accounts Active
Google users have a variety of alternatives for maintaining an active account status. It typically suffices to use a Google product while logged in to keep the account active. Google expressly lists the following activities:
- Sending or reading an email
- Google Drive use
- watching videoes on YouTube
- installing an app from Google Play Store
- Google Search
- Sign in with Google to a third-party app or service
Even if the accounts are not used, customers who already have subscriptions set up, such as Google One or YouTube Premium, won’t have their accounts considered inactive.
Users must sign in to Google Photos at least every two years to keep their accounts from being deemed inactive, according to Google. Google states that otherwise, content like images might be destroyed. Google will notify users several times if it thinks that their photo storage might be put on inactive status. Google advises users to use the takeout function to download important data to their devices for backups.
Google advises users to routinely sign in to their accounts if they wish to maintain them. To maintain the active status, any of the other actions on the list—including utilizing a third-party program like Thunderbird to fetch Gmail emails—is adequate. Old Google accounts could be deleted to make username space available for Gmail and other Google services.
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