Google has announced that it will be deleting neglected Google accounts which have been inactive for more than two years.
According to Google’s Vice President of Product Management, Ruth Kricheli, the reason for this move is that the neglected accounts were more vulnerable to security threats due to having old or repeated passwords and were less likely to have two step authentication enabled.
“This means that these old accounts are often vulnerable and once the account has been compromised, it can be used for anything, from identity theft to a vector for unwanted or even malicious content, like spam,” Ruth Kricheli said on Tuesday.
The action will delete the whole account on top of cleaning out any data across the various Google platforms, such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Photos, Google Calendar and YouTube. However, this policy, which is an update to Google’s old policy on inactive accounts, is only applicable to personal accounts and not accounts associated to businesses or schools.
However, the deletion will not be activated until the owners of the inactive accounts are notified. Thus, several notices will be send to emails of the inactive accounts as well as to the recovery emails associated with those accounts. The first accounts to be deleted will be the accounts that were created but never used again.
When will it start?
The new policy, however, will not kick in until December of this year at the earliest so, if you have an inactive Google account, you have some time to retrieve the login information and log into the account.
Activities like reading and sending an email, using Google Drive, watching a YouTube video, downloading an app from Google Play Store, using Google Search, or signing in with Google to sign in to a third-party app or service all count as account activity and will mean the account won’t be deleted. Thus, simply logging into the account and then logging out will not count as an activity.
