Tech giant Google announced that it will delete any accounts that have been inactive for at least two years—including Gmail and YouTube accounts.
Google’s policy of deleting accounts will start in December 2023, and it will include Google accounts including YouTube, Google Docs, Google Meet, Google Calendar, Google Photos, and Gmail. The company said it will send out several warning notices to users and will conduct the purge of inactive accounts in several phases.
“The policy only applies to personal Google Accounts, and will not affect accounts for organizations like schools or businesses. This update aligns our policy with industry standards around retention and account deletion and also limits the amount of time Google retains your unused personal information,” according to the post.
The firm said that those inactive accounts are more likely to be hacked or compromised in some way and may have used old passwords that have since been compromised. Older accounts, it said, are much more likely not to have two-factor authentication in use, which Google said makes the data less secure.
“These accounts are often vulnerable, and once an account is compromised, it can be used for anything from identity theft to a vector for unwanted or even malicious content, like spam,” Google said in a May 16 bulletin, adding that it is “going to roll this out slowly and carefully, with plenty of notice.”
“We will take a phased approach, starting with accounts that were created and never used again,” it continued.
Gmail, one of the most popular email services in the world, is estimated to be used by at least 1.8 billion people worldwide. As for YouTube, the service has more than 2.6 billion monthly active users worldwide, data shows. It’s not clear how many Google accounts are inactive.
According to the Mountain View, California-based search giant, one way to keep a Google Account active is to sign in once every two years at the least. If one has signed into the account or any of the services—such as YouTube or Gmail—in recent days, the account is considered active and won’t be flagged for deleting, it said.
Other activity will also be considered, including sending or reading an email via a Gmail account, using Google Drive in some way, watching a video on YouTube, downloading a Google Play app, using Google Search, or using the Sign In feature.
But in the notice, Google said that users should back up their data and information associated with a Google Account.
“We encourage users to provide a recovery email at sign-up. It’s important to make sure this recovery email in your account settings is up-to-date,” the firm said. “We also offer a variety of free tools to help manage your account and provide options to backup your data. You can download and export your data to other platforms through our Takeout feature, which has been available for over a decade. Similarly, Inactive Account Manager allows users to decide what happens to their account and data when it becomes inactive for a period of up to 18 months.”