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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: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Friday May 19, @04:30AM
> 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.
Google has never allowed username reuse. You have always been able to delete your account, and no one is allowed to reuse that username.
> If nothing else for spamming and scamming. After all johnny5753@gmail.com is your personal friend so whatever he mailed you must be real ...
That is exactly why Google is doing this. A account that isn't logged into for two years is in all likelihood abandoned. Which means no one is there to detect that it has been compromised. Old, abandoned accounts with easily guessable passwords are an easy target for spamming and scamming.
> Notice that they MAY delete the account and all the content. Weird that they say may instead of will.
Obviously they want to give themselves future leeway. For example they may want to give an account to a deceased family members. They may also disable the feature to rewrite it. They don't want people to depend on the auto-delete feature and then sue them when their burner account is kept for law enforcement or something.
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