The Google accounts purge is coming. Is your account affected?
In an email with a vanilla title, "Updating our inactive account policies," Google warns its users of an upcoming accounts purge.
Photograph: Igor Nikushin/Shutterstock
Google is determined to sweep away all the dormant accounts that haven’t been active in the past two years, starting December 1st. All the messages and photos connected with an inactive account could soon be deleted.
Why is Google deleting the accounts?
Ruth Kricheli, vice president of product management at Google, wrote in a blog post that the company will update its inactivity policy for Google accounts across all its products. If a Google account has not been used or signed into for at least two years, the company may delete it and its contents, including content within Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar) and Google Photos.
“This is because forgotten or unattended accounts often rely on old or re-used passwords that may have been compromised, haven’t had two-factor authentication set up, and receive fewer security checks by the user,” Kricheli says in the blog. “Our internal analysis shows abandoned accounts are at least 10x less likely than active accounts to have 2-step verification set up. Meaning 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.”
While inactive personal accounts are getting purged, Google says that business or school accounts will not be affected.
According to a 2022 survey conducted by Statista on 1,000 American email users aged over 18, 37 percent of them had two email addresses, while 28 percent had over four. There are 1.8 billion active Gmail users now. It is hard to imagine how many dormant accounts are lying out there—think of the single-use email addresses you create for free trials or various services.
Although the tech giant justified the move as an approach to safeguard account security, it is also difficult to neglect that the company is in a cost-cutting mode this year, and storage space on free accounts is a cost for it.
How can you keep the accounts?
Now that you are reading the news, it’s probably a good idea to try signing in to the Google Account you want to keep but haven’t touched in a while. Note that the sign-in to any Google service is considered active and won’t lead to account deletion. Other activities also include reading or sending emails, using Google Drive, Watching a YouTube video (through a Google account), downloading an app on the Google Play Store, using Google Search, or signing in to a third-party app or service using Sign in with Google.
If you have a subscription through a Google Account to any news publication or app, it’s also considered active. “Additionally, we do not have plans to delete accounts with YouTube videos at this time,” the company says in the blog post.
You still can’t get that occupied email address you want
However, even though the Google accounts purge will lead to at least millions of deletions, the company has specified that this will not free up any email addresses.
Freeing up email addresses could lead to severe security risks. For example, someone could impersonate the previous owner and send out malicious emails via those addresses. But getting access to some special accounts, like accounts of the deceased, is possible.
Fast backward to a decade ago or even five years ago, the idea of a digital legacy or a digital will was ludicrous. But as social media and digital information seep into our lives and serve almost like a digital twin of ourselves, digital legacy is no longer an offbeat concept but a practical choice.
Facebook allows users to choose a legacy contact that will have access to their accounts after their death (but cannot edit or delete any content). Google also has a similar “Data & privacy” setting feature. “Make a plan for your digital legacy” allows users to add backup contact information for themselves and choose up to 10 other people to notify if their account is inactive for a selected period of time. There’s also an option to have the account self-destruct (delete) after it is inactive for a set amount of time.
