I don't work for google. I use Google, I have multiple Gmail as well as hosted by Google workspace domains.
Overall I think this is reasonable. I can't see why people are upset, when the general burden to make it "live" is low.
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.
All the cards are stacked against the users though. It's not that easy for a non-tech person to use any sort of email/photo library etc that isn't free from Google/Apple etc.
Even self hosting email is impossible now. You won't be able to send emails because nothing trusts you.
If Google intentionally incentivized everyone to move their entire digital lives into their platform for profit, they should have some sort of responsibility for that. There have absolutely been significant impact to people's lives because they've gotten locked out of their account for reasons that even Google can't explain, and there is no recourse or action they can take.
Yet that is exactly what so-called "tech" companies enable, and arguably encourage, millions of people to do. They certainly do not discourage people from using their websites and apps, for any purpose, from what I have seen. That would make no sense. Imagine Google showing a warning along the lines of "Do not use Gmail for important purposes." Instead the message might be "Here is something to enhance security". These companies have conflicts of interest vis-a-vis computer users. It's like an opioids company tasked with preventing addiction. The best they can do is promote treatment of addiction. This is a poor analogy because selling drugs is regulated. Handing out free email accounts, in order to conduct commercial surveillance, is not.
> Google also reserves the right to delete data in a product if you are inactive in that product for at least two years.
This part is unreasonable no? I sometimes don't use a product for a while, like google drive for instance, and the prospect of coming back to it and discovering that all my data has been deleted is a bit on the dreadful side. I don't want to have to keep track of which product Ive been using and how long since I last signed into all the time.
It's not free at all, Google uses every bit of data you reveal to them to power their ad business. It's a form of payment even if we don't talk about it this way.
This line of thinking also reveals an explanation for this new "Inactive Account" policy. Google doesn't care to keep old data — one needs to either feed them new signals they can sell / use to train their AIs or else... your account gets deleted.
It’s fair to delete data. It’s not fair to delete the account.
People have email addresses linked up to all kinds of other accounts. Sometimes my only way into an old non-Google account is a gmail address I made a long time ago. Often there is no way to change the email address linked to an account.
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?
Also reading this closely there's separate timers per product? This is worse than making sure my domains aren't going to expire...
This could be an effect of California law that doesn't allow businesses to expire gift certificates. They have to honor it as long as they're still in business.
> Before this happens, Google will give you an opportunity to take an action in your account by:
> Sending email notifications to your Google Account
> Sending notifications to your recovery email, if any exists
Further up it says that reading an email counts as being active.
So if you have IMAP access does that count when you simply read that email?!
I have gmail accounts with IMAP that haven’t logged into the web interface in years. I can’t be the only one in this boat. This is very ambiguous and troubling.
If you read your Google account's emails, you had to log in (POP3 and IMAP both require authentication). If you logged in, that means the account is active. Sounds simple enough to me.
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.
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.
I have a Gmail account [1] and I regularly get email for other people who share my name (at least three others). I find it amazing they think that's their email address (or other people think that they'll reach the right person by just <firstname><lastname>@gmail.com).
[1] Not my primary account but I got it to give Gmail a try when it was first opened to the public. I personally found it 'meh' but kept the account for testing purposes with my own email server.
> I think of likely reasons this happens is username exhaustion.
I disagree, there is a solution out there, it's just more work because the client-software has to be smarter. We can take inspiration from how our meat-space society functions, where everybody maintains their own contextual aliases as metadata, something that can be personalized or shared.
For example, imagine we have a big global commenting site, and my own metadata says "Terr_ believes ID 49985189215 is Bob Smith."
When I ask the software to contact "Bob Smith", it knows who I mean from that mapping. When I publish something for other people to see and add a special reference to Bob Smith, it contains "{49985189215 which author knows as "Bob Smith}". People who already know 49985189215 as "Bobby Smith" would see that pop up on their screen instead, and the rare few which have a conflicting "Bob Smith" would see it rendered differently, making it obvious I don't mean their Bob Smith.
It gets more complex though when you consider the same user with multiple contexts: "I'll call Bob" at home might easily be a totally different person than "I'll call Bob" in the workplace.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
* 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.
* Yet, providers are allowed to TREAT it as a trivial inconsequintial thing.
* 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.
* 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"
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.
> 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.
I would absolutely not consider a free account on anything to outlive a paid product. Quite the opposite: If I'm not paying for any kind of SLA, written in an agreement, I assume the account in question is temporary, could disappear at any moment, and treat it as such: Never rely on it for anything where you'd be screwed if you suddenly got locked out.
There have been so many, many, many, many of these "I got locked out of my free Xyz account with no appeal possible!!" stories, I'm shocked that people still rely on them. And if you say, well, you shouldn't have put your 401(k) retirement account behind that E-mail address, they call you victim blaming. People, your free account is worth what you pay for it.
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.
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.
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)
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.
No one said anything about Google absolutely deleting data. They specifically state, "reserves the right to delete an inactive Google Account and its activity and data" ... and further below "and all of its content and data may be deleted"
Call me suspicious, but reserves the right and may be deleted to me says that they may not actually have plans of deleting the account data outright. Maybe they just can't even guarantee being able to completely wipe all the associated account data. I think they could have the external appearance of having deleted the account with no real internal change.
Oh and here's a question. If they delete an account, and then someone goes in and registers the same name, then what? Talk about an opportunity for further account hijacking (for example, password recovery from old logins). To prevent this, presumably they would still at least maintain a record that the account previously existed and cannot be registered again.
ggm|2 years ago
Overall I think this is reasonable. I can't see why people are upset, when the general burden to make it "live" is low.
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.
I pay for google 1 and I takeout periodically.
Don't depend on "free" for critical functions.
palijer|2 years ago
All the cards are stacked against the users though. It's not that easy for a non-tech person to use any sort of email/photo library etc that isn't free from Google/Apple etc.
Even self hosting email is impossible now. You won't be able to send emails because nothing trusts you.
If Google intentionally incentivized everyone to move their entire digital lives into their platform for profit, they should have some sort of responsibility for that. There have absolutely been significant impact to people's lives because they've gotten locked out of their account for reasons that even Google can't explain, and there is no recourse or action they can take.
1vuio0pswjnm7|2 years ago
Yet that is exactly what so-called "tech" companies enable, and arguably encourage, millions of people to do. They certainly do not discourage people from using their websites and apps, for any purpose, from what I have seen. That would make no sense. Imagine Google showing a warning along the lines of "Do not use Gmail for important purposes." Instead the message might be "Here is something to enhance security". These companies have conflicts of interest vis-a-vis computer users. It's like an opioids company tasked with preventing addiction. The best they can do is promote treatment of addiction. This is a poor analogy because selling drugs is regulated. Handing out free email accounts, in order to conduct commercial surveillance, is not.
srik|2 years ago
This part is unreasonable no? I sometimes don't use a product for a while, like google drive for instance, and the prospect of coming back to it and discovering that all my data has been deleted is a bit on the dreadful side. I don't want to have to keep track of which product Ive been using and how long since I last signed into all the time.
isodev|2 years ago
It's not free at all, Google uses every bit of data you reveal to them to power their ad business. It's a form of payment even if we don't talk about it this way.
This line of thinking also reveals an explanation for this new "Inactive Account" policy. Google doesn't care to keep old data — one needs to either feed them new signals they can sell / use to train their AIs or else... your account gets deleted.
zarzavat|2 years ago
People have email addresses linked up to all kinds of other accounts. Sometimes my only way into an old non-Google account is a gmail address I made a long time ago. Often there is no way to change the email address linked to an account.
cobertos|2 years ago
Also reading this closely there's separate timers per product? This is worse than making sure my domains aren't going to expire...
pnw|2 years ago
dataflow|2 years ago
Probably not. I think the point is to ensure there's human interaction. Don't expect any automated activity to affect the timer.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
believ3|2 years ago
> Your Google Account contains a gift card with a monetary balance.
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!
drewda|2 years ago
hackernewds|2 years ago
koolba|2 years ago
> Sending email notifications to your Google Account
> Sending notifications to your recovery email, if any exists
Further up it says that reading an email counts as being active.
So if you have IMAP access does that count when you simply read that email?!
I have gmail accounts with IMAP that haven’t logged into the web interface in years. I can’t be the only one in this boat. This is very ambiguous and troubling.
Dalewyn|2 years ago
tedunangst|2 years ago
blehn|2 years ago
numpad0|2 years ago
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.
omoikane|2 years ago
I think Google never recycles usernames due to security reasons:
https://support.google.com/mail/thread/48938290
https://twitter.com/Google/status/974054535974006784
Maybe you are suggesting that this policy is about to change?
spc476|2 years ago
[1] Not my primary account but I got it to give Gmail a try when it was first opened to the public. I personally found it 'meh' but kept the account for testing purposes with my own email server.
Terr_|2 years ago
I disagree, there is a solution out there, it's just more work because the client-software has to be smarter. We can take inspiration from how our meat-space society functions, where everybody maintains their own contextual aliases as metadata, something that can be personalized or shared.
For example, imagine we have a big global commenting site, and my own metadata says "Terr_ believes ID 49985189215 is Bob Smith."
When I ask the software to contact "Bob Smith", it knows who I mean from that mapping. When I publish something for other people to see and add a special reference to Bob Smith, it contains "{49985189215 which author knows as "Bob Smith}". People who already know 49985189215 as "Bobby Smith" would see that pop up on their screen instead, and the rare few which have a conflicting "Bob Smith" would see it rendered differently, making it obvious I don't mean their Bob Smith.
It gets more complex though when you consider the same user with multiple contexts: "I'll call Bob" at home might easily be a totally different person than "I'll call Bob" in the workplace.
hsbauauvhabzb|2 years ago
yftsui|2 years ago
dustymcp|2 years ago
qingcharles|2 years ago
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.
hsbauauvhabzb|2 years ago
Google had no ability to speak to a human, and don’t care about me or you in the slightest.
Brian_K_White|2 years ago
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.
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.
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:
* 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.
* Yet, providers are allowed to TREAT it as a trivial inconsequintial thing.
* 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.
* 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"
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.
ryandrake|2 years ago
I would absolutely not consider a free account on anything to outlive a paid product. Quite the opposite: If I'm not paying for any kind of SLA, written in an agreement, I assume the account in question is temporary, could disappear at any moment, and treat it as such: Never rely on it for anything where you'd be screwed if you suddenly got locked out.
There have been so many, many, many, many of these "I got locked out of my free Xyz account with no appeal possible!!" stories, I'm shocked that people still rely on them. And if you say, well, you shouldn't have put your 401(k) retirement account behind that E-mail address, they call you victim blaming. People, your free account is worth what you pay for it.
the_third_wave|2 years ago
Centrino|2 years ago
What if the account is secured by 2FA? Are you advocating to disable 2FA for the sake of your automated continuity of the account?
hackernewds|2 years ago
haglin|2 years ago
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.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
Dalewyn|2 years ago
Just buy a book, movie, game, or a subscription of some sort and it won't go inactive ever.
fruitreunion1|2 years ago
chaostheory|2 years ago
I can't help but feel that they're slowly turning into a Yahoo though, given this policy and their now terrible search results.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
habibur|2 years ago
Time changes.
taftster|2 years ago
Call me suspicious, but reserves the right and may be deleted to me says that they may not actually have plans of deleting the account data outright. Maybe they just can't even guarantee being able to completely wipe all the associated account data. I think they could have the external appearance of having deleted the account with no real internal change.
Oh and here's a question. If they delete an account, and then someone goes in and registers the same name, then what? Talk about an opportunity for further account hijacking (for example, password recovery from old logins). To prevent this, presumably they would still at least maintain a record that the account previously existed and cannot be registered again.
ChrisArchitect|2 years ago
ChrisArchitect|2 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36791895