Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)
You may have thought a Google account was forever, but the company's latest blog post details a new policy of deleting inactive Google accounts. The new deadline is two years—if your account hasn't seen "activity" in that amount of time, Google is going to delete your data forever.
The company pitches this as a way to prevent spam. The blog post says that "abandoned accounts are at least 10x less likely than active accounts to have 2-step-verification set up," and once they get compromised, they become vectors for spam and identity theft. Deleting old accounts and freeing up storage is also probably a good way to cut costs, which has been a thing at Google lately.
Google's inactive account policy only applies to individual accounts. If you're a business account and paying a monthly fee, it's no shock that you can stay inactive for as long as the money arrives. Google says: "The simplest way to keep a Google Account active is to sign-in at least once every 2 years." That's all it takes to be active. Google also lists a few examples of "activity" if you're already signed in:
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Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)
You may have thought a Google account was forever, but the company's latest blog post details a new policy of deleting inactive Google accounts. The new deadline is two years—if your account hasn't seen "activity" in that amount of time, Google is going to delete your data forever.
The company pitches this as a way to prevent spam. The blog post says that "abandoned accounts are at least 10x less likely than active accounts to have 2-step-verification set up," and once they get compromised, they become vectors for spam and identity theft. Deleting old accounts and freeing up storage is also probably a good way to cut costs, which has been a thing at Google lately.
Google's inactive account policy only applies to individual accounts. If you're a business account and paying a monthly fee, it's no shock that you can stay inactive for as long as the money arrives. Google says: "The simplest way to keep a Google Account active is to sign-in at least once every 2 years." That's all it takes to be active. Google also lists a few examples of "activity" if you're already signed in:
Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
May 17, 2023 at 12:58AM
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