Curated By: Shaurya Sharma
Last Updated: November 28, 2023, 12:46 IST
Mountain View, California, USA
To stop deletion, you will need to change your account’s inactive standing.
Haven’t used your Google account for greater than two years? Remember to make it lively once more in order that it does not get deleted on December 1, 2023.
It’s unlikely that you just haven’t used your Google account shortly, however whether it is certainly the case, or when you’ve got a secondary account that you just don’t verify usually—bear in mind that Google will delete it on December 1, 2023, which is just a few days away at this level.
Yes, Google goes to start out erasing inactive Google accounts, together with all the information related to them—photographs, Gmail, contacts, Drive storage, and so forth.
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The essential half right here is that your account is taken into account ‘inactive’ should you haven’t used it in a minimum of two years. So, should you’ve logged in lately, you’re all good. But should you’re studying this and might’t bear in mind the final time you checked your account, you want to do one of many following issues to make it ‘active’ once more:
- Read or ship an electronic mail out of your Google account.
- Use Google Drive to add or obtain content material.
- Watch a video on YouTube from the identical account.
- Share a photograph by way of Google Photo.
- Download an app from the Play Store together with your registered Google account.
- Upload a YouTube video.
Why Is Google Erasing ‘Inactive’ Accounts?
Google—in a coverage change doc from May this yr—acknowledged that it has “invested in technology and tools to protect our users from security threats, such as spam, phishing scams, and account hijacking,” however that if an account has not been used for a protracted time frame, it could grow to be “compromised.”
Google additional added: “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. Our internal analysis shows abandoned accounts are at least 10x less likely than active accounts to have 2-step-verification set up.”
Only ‘Personal’ Accounts Are Affected
To be clear, this coverage change solely applies to non-public Google accounts. Accounts arrange by academic establishments and official enterprise accounts is not going to be deleted. Additionally, accounts with YouTube movies uploaded is not going to be affected.