Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by hubie on Thursday May 18, @11:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the sanitized-for-your-protection dept.

https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/updating-our-inactive-account-policies/

Google to start deleting inactive personal email accounts. If your personal email account with Google have been inactive for two years it will, or may, be deleted.

To reduce this risk, we are updating our inactivity policy for Google Accounts to 2 years across our products. Starting later this year, if a Google Account has not been used or signed into for at least 2 years, we may delete the account and its contents ...

Notice that they MAY delete the account and all the content. Weird that they say may instead of will. Will some of them be kept around anyway? Are they saving the content but deleting the account? Is it so the Google AI can have one long good snoop before it goes into dev/null?

I might have missed it but to delete accounts for security reasons, that seems to be the reason given, is by itself sort of a security issue. After all what stops someone from re-registering the names afterwards. Hope that whatever mail they had keeps on sending to the address. Or it can be used to recover account credentials with other services. Deleting in that regard seems bad if they do not also block re-registration of said emails for a very very long time. Most of them will be duds but if you automate the process you'll hit digital credentials gold eventually.

If nothing else for spamming and scamming. After all johnny5753@gmail.com is your personal friend so whatever he mailed you must be real ...


Original Submission

 
This discussion was created by hubie (1068) for logged-in users only. Log in and try again!
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18, @12:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18, @12:19PM (#1306832)

    > To reduce this risk, we are updating our inactivity policy for Google Accounts to 2 years

    Sure enough, there was an email from Google about 2 years ago announcing that inactive accounts might be deleted. Reading between the lines, I got the impression that accounts with a lot of dead storage (old photos, other large attachments??) might be first to be deleted, but that's just my take.

    That same email also included links to several Google pages that were claimed to give more details about what counts as activity (or inactivity) and other Google policies. I tried all those links and they were all dead this morning...

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1