I don't work for google. I use Google, I have multiple Gmail as well as hosted by Google workspace domains.<p>Overall I think this is reasonable. I can't see why people are upset, when the general burden to make it "live" is low.<p>There are specific corner case problems: people who cannot login for various reasons, can't get Google humans to help, and who get mail forwarded so are limping along. And, there are a surprisingly high number of people who seem to trip up over account recovery. If I had one criticism of google here, it's that they're judge, jury and executioner. There's no appeal mechanism for ordinary mortal. It's capricious, sometimes squeaky wheels get oiled, sometimes not.<p>I pay for google 1 and I takeout periodically.<p>Don't depend on "free" for critical functions.
Wish you could check your inactivity status more closely than their suggested "if you're not sure, just sign in to the Google account". I have a couple Google accounts that are just pulling email to a separate mailbox and who knows if that's active or not. Maybe I'll have to buy something on one of those accounts just to get it exempt?<p>Also reading this closely there's separate timers per product? This is worse than making sure my domains aren't going to expire...
> Exceptions to this policy:<p>> Your Google Account contains a gift card with a monetary balance.<p>So, all I need to do to keep a Google Account active indefinitely is just link an unspent $10 gift card to the account? Sweet!
> Before this happens, Google will give you an opportunity to take an action in your account by:<p>> Sending email notifications to your Google Account<p>> Sending notifications to your recovery email, if any exists<p>Further up it says that reading an email counts as being active.<p>So if you have IMAP access does that count when you simply read that email?!<p>I have gmail accounts with IMAP that haven’t logged into the web interface in <i>years</i>. I can’t be the only one in this boat. This is very ambiguous and troubling.
I think this is the end of my Gmail account, which has been locked for some time due to suspicious activity. All it does is forward email, but no more.
I forward multiple gmail accounts to a single account and use the "Send mail as" feature to also send mail from those other accounts. Will either of those actions trigger the "Reading or sending an email" activity that Google referred to?
I think of likely reasons this happens is username exhaustion. >100 million people are born every year, it won’t take centuries for us to fill up every namespaces with dead accounts.<p>Before that inevitably happens, there will probably be a point we all have to switch over to identification not by user selected username but random alphanumeric ID string, with display names only for search, free from uniqueness requirements and somehow impersonation resistant. A lot of social media actually uses such ID in the backend/for internal uses(variable length primary key!? Of course not!), maybe it’s time frontend experiences think about that, too.
Now if only I could get the data out of my account. I've spent far too long arguing with people at Google, but I can't get into my account because I lost the phone number attached to it, even though I have the password, and a recovery email address and all the mail from my Gmail gets forwarded to that address as it comes in.<p>They say I have no right to my data since I can't log into the account, but I don't think the law works that way. I have a right to my data, they are entitled to give it to me if I can prove I am who I say I am, which I can.
Imagine all the normal people who can not run their own mail server and do not have the paranoia or the time to set up 3 of everything and never miss the periodic chores to keep them all alive just to guard against one of them being cancelled.<p>You certainly don't want anything important like your retirement account to rely on something transient like your isp email, or even a paid email from some smaller company that you might forget to pay on time one year, or they just decide they don't like you for not even necessarily anything you did.<p>So you use gmail or hotmail etc, not because they are free, because they arre presumed to outlive everything else, and be safer because of that. And that much is completely true and not a mistake.<p>There are a few really bad things on a collision course here that hasn't been properly dealt with at a society/regulation level yet:<p>* gmail, and email in general, is not an inconsequential thing like a Spotify account, or like email when it was new and nothing important in life depended on it yet. Life-critical things depend on it now. There are many things now where your email is the ultimate way a service provider knows you. There is no office you can go to to clear up any kind of account error as an ultimate option.<p>* Yet, providers are allowed to TREAT it as a trivial inconsequintial thing.<p>* google absolutely is responsible for actively drawing people to use gmail and become dependant on gmail and other google services. It isn't good enough to say they don't make anyone, they do actively pursue it. Same goes for others not just google.<p>* too many consequential things are allowed accept mere email and login credentials as the only form of proof of identity without an equivalent for the ultimate option you always used to have for any possible thing: "Go down town to the credit union office and present myself and my drivers license and my birth certificate, or 20 other people from the community who all simply say "yeah that's her, I'm even the doctor who delivered her, and she's even your own siter in law so you know she was married to the house owner, so give her her house deed even though the husband died in the war last year and the town clerks office burned down and no one can produce the piece of paper now"<p>I don't know what I would do if betterment.com decided not to honor my login or I couldn't repond via either of the two email addresses on file. It's 2 different addresses from two different providers, but even 2 is still only 2. If one can break, two can break. So much of my life's resources all hinging on something so flimsy. This is not robust. Now multiply that by x billion other people, most of whom are not aware how fragile their access to these important things is, and how little they can do about it if they are unlucky and have a problem.
Given that G states that "doing a search" is considered to be "activity" it shouldn't be too hard to rig up an automated account shaker which at large but not too large intervals - something between 16 and 22 months - logs in on some headless browser, searches Google for a random thing and logs out again.
Two years it too short.<p>The reason I now use gmail and not hotmail is because Microsoft did a similar thing 20 years ago. When I lost my hotmail account, I thought I might as well use gmail from now on. Reason I didn't log into my hotmail account was because I used the mail address I got from the university.
The listed exceptions in short mean that any account which has conducted monetary transactions on Google Play are exempted from inactivity. Sounds simple, fair, and easy to me.<p>Just buy a book, movie, game, or a subscription of some sort and it won't go inactive ever.
How does this affect old YouTube videos (and possibly other historical public content)? (obviously, save everything you love while you still can in case things get removed or difficult to archive due to attestation/DRM)
This is totally fair, since the service isn't paid with money.<p>I can't help but feel that they're slowly turning into a Yahoo though, given this policy and their now terrible search results.
Back then, maybe two decades back, Google was seen as evil as it declined to acknowledge that it will delete user data after the user has closed its account.<p>Time changes.