cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/545658
Inactive Google Account Policy
A Google Account gives you Google-wide access to most Google products, such as Google Ads, Gmail, and YouTube, using the same username and password.
An inactive Google Account is an account that has not been used within a 2-year period. Google reserves the right to delete an inactive Google Account and its activity and data if you are inactive across Google for at least two years.
Google also 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.
How Google defines activity
A Google Account that is in use is considered active. Activity might include these actions you take when you sign in or while you’re signed in to your Google Account:
- Reading or sending an email
- Using Google Drive
- Watching a YouTube video
- Sharing a photo
- Downloading an app
- Using Google Search
- Using Sign in with Google to sign in to a third-party app or service
Google Account activity is demonstrated by account and not by device. You can take actions on any surface where you’re signed in to your Google Account, for example, on your phone.
If you have more than one Google Account set up on your device, you’ll want to make sure each account is used within a 2-year period.
What happens when your Google Account is inactive
When your Google Account has not been used within a 2-year period, your Google Account, that is then deemed inactive, and all of its content and data may be deleted. Before this happens, Google will give you an opportunity to take an action in your account by:
- Sending email notifications to your Google Account
- Sending notifications to your recovery email, if any exists
Google products reserve the right to delete your data when your account has not been used within that product for a 2-year period.
December 1, 2023 is the earliest a Google Account will be deleted due to this policy.
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Thats pretty reasonable. I’m sure there are a ton of orphan accounts just lingering out there. Including accounts that other people may like to have.
All of these companies are tightening their belts. Those interest rates going up are sure making companies reassess their business models.
[…] Including accounts that other people may like to have.
What do you mean? I think google made it clear before that an account name will not be registerabled again
An inactive account is one more desirable to hack into and steal the identity of, that was my takeaway, not some scalped “a@google.com” username that’s valuable for no good reason
I guess I missed that and it makes sense. God knows it’d be a security/privacy nightmare if someone got account reset emails for someone else.
This terrifies the data hoarder part of me :(
I have an old lost YouTube account, where I cannot login anymore. Unfortunately some of these videos I uploaded 15 years ago, embedded on some web pages by fans or in playlists will be not available anymore. There are many inactive accounts where I watch or listen to videos in YouTube, or download them for archival reasons.
Youtube-dl is your friend here, grab an offline copy before they’re gone for good.
I already do! In fact I use an alternative, because youtube-dl is extremely slow (we talk about less 1Mbit for me). I recommend everyone
yt-dlp, which is a fork of youtube-dl and downloads everything as fast as possible for my connection.My worry is, that many videos and music videos will become inaccessible / deleted in the future. I can download stuff I know about now, but there is so much out there that I fear gets lost. I hope at least YouTube videos that have high number of visits or likes or are often shared in playlists won’t get deleted.
Thank you for sharing this. Passed along to friends for awareness.
