People who haven’t sign to their Google account for more than two years will most likely lose it beginning from December 2023 because the tech giant says it will start to delete inactive accounts from its database.
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According to the company, the action becomes imperative to protect its users from security threats such as phishing scams, account hijacking, and spam.
“Our internal analysis shows abandoned accounts are at least 10x less likely than active accounts to have 2-step-verification set up,” it says in one of its May 16 blog post.
Why Google is deleting inactive accounts
It pointed out that even with some protections put in place by the account user, abandoning an account for an extended period of time expose it to be compromised.
This means, if an account is compromised, it can be used by the attackers for many things such using it to spread unsolicited messages and even malicious content.
Google is taking the deletion action starting from December 2023 to reduce risk across Google products.
The action also aligns with Google industry standards around retention and account deletion and to “limits the amount of time Google retains” users’ unused personal information.
What products will be affected?
When an account is deleted, content within the Google Workspace that will be affected includes:
- Gmail,
- Docs,
- Drive,
- Meet,
- Calendar
- YouTube and
- Google Photos
Who will not be affected?
The latest policy on Google accounts only applies to personal accounts.
This means corporate accounts such as schools or businesses will not be affected.
While the Google policy on account deletion takes effect from May 16, 2023, deletion will not take place till December 2023 after several notifications have been sent to account owners.
The hammer will first land on accounts that were created but never used.
Will I be affected?
No, you will not be affected if you keep your account active sign in at least once in every two years.
You can keep your account active to using any of the services provided by the tech giant.
Preventing your Google account from being deleted
- Login to Gmail either by reading or sending an email
- Watching YouTube video
- By using Google Drive
- By using Google documents
- By downloading an app on Google Play Store
- By dropping a review on an app on Google Play Store
- By using Google search
In case you want to pull out of Google services or you don’t want to use the account again, you will be able to export your data.
