If you haven’t used your account for a long time Googlepay attention: those of Mountain View plan delete all those inactive for at least 2 years. Thus, the company seeks to protect users from attacks by phishing or spam and malware campaigns.
According to Californians explained, the measure corresponds to a modification of its existing inactive account policy. Until now, Google could delete content stored in services like Google Photos or Gmail, if an account had been inactive for 2 years. However, this time they have decided to go a step further.
If there is no activity on a Google account within two years, it will be completely removed. And the same will happen with all the content associated with it through Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Photos, etc. The plan will go live in December.
It is worth clarifying that the measure will only impact personal use accounts. Those belonging to companies or other types of organizations will not be affected. In any case, those of Mountain View indicated that the activation of this new policy will not be overnight. Nor do they plan to delete Google accounts without giving prior notice.
Google changes its inactive account policy
According to Google, the deletion of accounts will be done in stages, and the first to disappear will be those that were created and never used. In addition, those that are in danger of being deleted will be informed several times and months in advance.
The latter may sound a bit silly, since if they have been inactive for at least 2 years, it is likely that no one will see those notifications. For this reason, the company will also send the notices to the recovery emails, as long as they have been provided by the users.
Google security experts say that accounts that remain inactive for long periods of time often become prized loot for hackers. This is dangerous because, for example, if they are hacked, they could be used to impersonate their original owner and involve them in scams and other types of cybercrime. In addition, they maintain that in this type of abandoned accounts it is 10 times more likely that two-step verification is not activated.
If you have a Google account that hasn’t been used for 2 years or more, but you don’t want to delete it, the steps to follow are very simple. Those of Mountain View recommend login at least once every 24 monthsalthough it is not the only option.
They also invite users to use Google Drive, watch videos on YouTube or download apps from the Play Store. The latter can be useful in the event that the account is not used regularly, but is logged in on some device. If they prefer to recover the contents of an account before they delete it, they can export a copy with Google Takeout.