Google is updating its policies regarding inactive accounts.
The tech giant is updating their policy on account inactivity for 2 years across all of their products. That means that if a user hasn’t been utilizing their accounts, Google will delete that account and then delete all of its data across Google Workspace (Gmail, Drive, Docs, Meet, Calendar) and Google Photos.
Although the policy took effect on May 16, it would not immediately affect users who have an inactive account. The possible early account deletion would be in December 2023.
Ruth Kricheli, vice president for product management at the tech platform, claims in a blog that “they [Google] have invested in technology and tools to protect their users from security threats, like spam, phishing scams, and account hijacking.”
But despite the tech platform’s investments, there are factors that indicate that those accounts that were unattended for a long period of time are on the brink of having their security compromised. The reason? Those accounts are often relying on old or re-used passwords that might have been compromised, hadn’t gone through double authentication, and had been receiving few security checks.
Abandoned accounts are 10 times more likely to have double-authentication security checks, according to Google’s internal analysis. Accounts that are then compromised are more vulnerable to cybercrimes such as identity theft and scams.
But there are ways to survive your account’s looming deletion. Here are some steps that you could practice to prevent such an event:
- Check your inbox on Gmail.
- Use Google Drive to back up your important documents.
- Watch random videos on YouTube.
- Download apps or games from the Google Play Store.
- Search anything on Google.com.
- Sign in with your Gmail account when opening accounts on third-party apps or services.
For those people who have accounts that have any existing subscriptions to third-party apps or services, doing the process app is encouraged to do so to prevent account deletion. In the meantime, they don’t have any deletion plans yet for accounts that uploaded videos to YouTube.
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