[johnnycerberus]

I totally support this. It still amazes me that companies still do not delete/anonymize user accounts after periods of inactivity. Everything that is linked to your email address should be purged after 3-12 months of inactivity, including ecommerce like Amazon, game platforms like Steam, cloud storages like Dropbox, or even Hackernews. Good luck trying to find old accounts that you have used years ago, what if they were breached and now they are used by people with bad intentions. In my country (Romania), even barber shops that store user accounts for longer periods than necessary are fined the shit out of them for not closing accounts due to inactivity. Some years ago, I woke up with an inactive G2A account telling me that I have to pay a fee for inactivity. NO! I don't have to pay anything, purge it!

[slickdork]

Mildly related: In America, e-mails stored on a server for over 180 days are considered 'abandoned' and can be viewed by law enforcement without warrants. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Priv...

[Matticus_Rex]

The bill to fix this relic of a time where people stored emails in noticeably-finite inboxes, the Email Privacy Act, passed the House this session but got knocked out of the bill in the Senate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_Privacy_Act

[goodpoint]

How comes there are no ongoing protests? This is appalling.

[indrora]

This explains the "179 day retention policy" that I've seen at several places.

[akersten]

> Everything that is linked to your email address should be purged after 3-12 months of inactivity, including

That is such a horrible idea, I go on vacations longer than that. My Dropbox should be deleted if I don't log in for 4 months?

[Breza]

I completely agree with you. There are plenty of reasons that someone might not use a website for a long time. I didn't use Amtrak from March 2020 through November 2021 and I'm glad I didn't lose my account status.

"Sorry, you can't log into this NCAA bracket website because you haven't used it since last year."

"Why would I use it more than once a year?"

[inetknght]

> I go on vacations longer than that.

That's the bigger injustice, tbqh.

[johnnycerberus]

Do you have a paid account or a free account? If I store my documents on a free account for a one time send to the university application and then I forget about it, then Dropbox should purge it after a time to protect my data, as I don't have any "contract" with them like a subscription or something. The same for G2A, I have bought from them some game keys at a cheap price sometime ago and then I totally forgot that I have one, I couldn't even find the activation mail in my inbox, lol. One day in the summer I woke up with a mail that I have to pay an inactivity fee even if I'm just a row in their database and I have no contractual obligation with them.

[kevinventullo]

Strongly disagree, for Steam in particular. I played a lot of computer games in high school and early college, then stopped for about 7 years. When I finally bought a new computer, I somehow remembered my old Steam password and was thrilled to find that all the old games were still on my account, ready to download. In comparison, I had long lost any physical copies of games I had purchased as a youth.

As a bonus, I get the “bragging rights” of having nearly the oldest possible steam account (it can now vote).

[rntksi]

What do you mean by "it can now vote" ? (honest curiousity)

[tluyben2]

I have accounts over 20 years old I use every few years. I would not be very amused if your suggestion takes off.

I can see simple things happening though that work towards this; for my pet project I just coded a feature that hashes email addresses of inactive (3 months without any interaction) and using another differently salted hash of their email address (which we then no longer have after this) to encrypt their data. They can still login, which restores their account and data without them noticing, but they will never receive email and possible breaches hurt less.

[robbedpeter]

Nobody is suggesting you can't consent to long term storage, we're advocating for a sane, privacy respecting default.

[wowokay]

I don't want to lose all my steam games just because I am inactive for a time. That us a terrible idea, I purchased those digital goods, that's like saying crypto markets should dump data from time to time.

[Schroedingersat]

Then fight for digital purchases to be actual purchases, not renting until you lose that account.

[luckylion]

If so, please make it opt-in. Let users set the auto-delete date themselves, because I don't want to have to make sure that I log in every other week to keep my account alive.

[b112]

This could work, along with a default setting, and if the config was easy to find.

Or not purposefully obscured.

[pjc50]

This would be a disaster for a lot of people.

[323]

> In my country (Romania), even barber shops that store user accounts for longer periods than necessary are fined

Those most be some fancy barber shops that you need online accounts for.

[Tijdreiziger]

Not Romanian, but you usually need to make an appointment at a barber (especially now that they can't/don't want to have too many people in their shop at once, due to COVID regulations). If you make the appointment online, then you can usually create an account to view/rebook/cancel it later, if necessary.

[valdiorn]

I book my hair appointment online. they ask for name, email and mobile phone number. They need the name to know who to expect for the appointment. They ask for email and/or phone to send you a reminder (which is nice, IMO).

Very reasonable and totally with the GDPR rules as well, as long as they purge the data after a certain time.

[peakaboo]

Why does it amaze you that companies want to keep user data when we know it's extreamly valuable?

[nine_k]

What is extremely valuable about data on an account which is dormant for years?