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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 ...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Thursday May 18, @02:04PM
This can't be about actual security (confidentiality, integrity, availability) because it will drive a proliferation of second, third, fourth, and so on accounts. As old ones are closed on purpose or by accident, people will be forced by various factors to re-join the inescapable Google ecosystem by creating a new account. So instead of john.doe@gmail.com you'll soon have john.doe.1@gmail.com through john.doe.n@gmail.com with some mixture of fake, real, and expired accounts.
So instead of security my guess is that the mover is really about trying to motivate a larger portion of the population to 1) stay logged in more often and for longer and 2) emit more farmable behaviors for Google.
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