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Google to Start Deleting Inactive Mail Accounts for Security Reasons

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

looorg writes:

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 ...

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Original Submission

• Corporate doublle-speak translated (Score: 5, Insightful) by owl on Thursday May 18, @12:36PM

  by owl (15206) on Thursday May 18, @12:36PM (#1306836)

  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

  What they say: "to reduce security risks"

  What they really mean:

  Some PM, looking for something to add to his/her accomplishments for the year has discovered that old, inactive, accounts are:

  1. Using space (i.e., costing us money) in the database tables where we store metadata
  2. Using space (i.e., costing us money) in the blob storage where we store content
  3. Not returning any active advertising revenue (i.e., not making us any money)

  And has decided to "add an item" to his yearly accomplishments list by saving google the cost of the db storage and blob storage to hold all that data -- which is not bringing in any advertising revenue because the account is inactive.

  Note that the most critical part is "no ad revenue". This is just the next item in a long list of examples (i.e., youtube) of google turning up the "advertising push" knob. This one is simply reversed -- instead of shoving ever more ads it is of the form: if we are not receiving any ad revenue, we are going to delete you.

  Starting Score:	1		point
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