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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 18, @05:48PM (1 child)
I lost several old accounts cause I refused to give them a phone number or attach an authenticator to them. I guess they are still around. But they'll never get any of that so I guess in about a year or so they'll be deleted.
No legacy accounts for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, @11:47AM
When Google first offered "Voice" as a Gmail add-on, they also gave out free phone numbers. I requested one in my area code and still use it for texting from my laptop (texting on Voice is free like beer).
I wonder if Google would accept that phone number as part of an authentication profile?