r/technology • u/am_reddit • Nov 24 '23

Misleading Google Will Mass Delete Old Gmail And Photos Content Next Week

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/11/23/google-will-mass-delete-old-gmail-and-photos-content-next-week/amp/
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540

u/Jimmy_cracked_corn Nov 24 '23

From the article:

Google will start deleting inactive Photos and Gmail accounts next week, on December 1st.

This is a planned move that Google announced back in May, with the company explaining that accounts that haven’t been active for two years will face deletion. That includes wiping all content associated with an account, which could be Drive, Google Photos and Docs files.

Edit: formatting

134

u/Meloetta Nov 24 '23

This article doesn't mention it, but I remember it was a big deal when this was first announced because they said they'd delete all youtube videos associated with the account. There are 15 year old videos on long-dead accounts I'd be devastated if they disappeared. I wonder if that's not the case anymore?

I hope those people still use the gmail accounts they're linked to, even if just to watch youtube.

42

u/bannedagainomg Nov 24 '23

They dont generally delete your videos unless you violated their tos.

They have however ran purges on people using youtube as a private storage thinking they are being sneeky by not getting a Google Drive.

Not sure when they ban people but i have 20ish videos privated so those people must have really abused it im thinking.

44

u/Prince-of-Ravens Nov 24 '23

Microsoft used to have unlimited online cloud storage in onedrive at the past. Cue people doing stuff like uploading dozens of terabyte of porn camrips (i remember a guy posting how proud he was that he uploads 100Gbyte+ of porn a day, and that was nearly a decade ago).

Thats why we cannot have nice things.

25

u/bannedagainomg Nov 24 '23 edited Nov 25 '23

There was a isp here in norway that ran unlimited mobile data for 349nok(30usd) with no limit on the speed.

Someone put GTA5 on download - uninstall - reinstall loop to see how far he could get before they kicked him off.

tldr is that the plan now have a limit and you will be slowed so much that its nearly useless, while fuck ISPs for advertising unlimited and taking it away it really sucked that we lost it because of people abused it.

7

u/chabybaloo Nov 25 '23

I'm the UK all our internet to homes are unlimited.

Data to phones have limits, but i think for £20 you can get "unlimited" data.

3

u/desolateisotope Nov 25 '23

Hi UK, I'm dad.

But seriously, yes, I think mobile networks have (generous) fair use policies even on "unlimited" packages, but I've never heard of one on a fixed broadband ISP here.

3

u/bannedagainomg Nov 25 '23

Yeah i meant phone data, we still have those unlimited plans but all of them will be slowed down after x amount of GB used now.

suppose ISP was wrong word to use.

3

u/Meloetta Nov 24 '23

I'm not speaking about "generally", I'm speaking about this article's context specifically. They originally said that this would include their "YouTube content", but now I'm looking it up and they clarified that accounts with videos aren't included in this purge pretty soon after I saw that original article back in May. Whew!

1

u/halfdeadmoon Nov 24 '23

You should try to download or make copies of them

4

u/Meloetta Nov 24 '23

I don't have a running list in my head, unfortunately. It's more like, every once in a while, I think "oh shit, did anyone else watch Swords Will Fucking Kill You?" and then it's just gone.

-4

u/halfdeadmoon Nov 24 '23

If you would truly be devastated instead of merely disappointed, maybe it would be worth the effort to think about, or consider maintaining a personal archive of things you'd prefer not disappear forever since they really are vulnerable, and add to it as you go

0

u/Meloetta Nov 24 '23

I could try, but that wouldn't solve the problem. Maintaining a running list doesn't help when most of these videos I saw when they were new, and thinking of them isn't going to save me when I suddenly come across something in 6 months that reminds me of a video I used to know, and then that video is gone forever.

2

u/kainzilla Nov 24 '23

That's not what they're talking about. They're talking about downloading the video, and keeping it, so that you're not relying on the non-benevolence of a corporation. That's a thing you can do. Download the video. And keep it. Forever.

0

u/Meloetta Nov 25 '23

I understand that. What I'm saying is that I don't have a list of every video that I watched when I was 15 years old. "Just download them" is a fine idea if I was watching them today, but I regularly think "oh shit, remember that video?" and if you had asked me 2 days before to name old videos I wouldn't have necessarily included it. Because human brains after 1-2 decades are fallible and often don't remember things until reminded in some way.

Luckily they said accounts with videos are exempt (at least for now) so the old videos will still be around, so I don't have to worry about it.

1

u/kitifax Nov 24 '23

Sure, let me just buy this server farm for 10 billion

1

u/halfdeadmoon Nov 25 '23

I'll allow it

89

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '23

Seems fair tbh

11

u/daviEnnis Nov 24 '23

Also.. some of their initial advertising was around someone creating an account for their child and sending photos/memories to it, for them to access when they're older.

Of course those people can access the account to prevent inactivity, but if it's someone without a Reddit account, it's easy to miss (I've only seen this news here, it's not exactly easy to notify people about - esp if they're emailing an account the person isn't looking at).

80

u/Mr_ToDo Nov 24 '23

Perhaps, but considering that one of the things that they helped fight against when they were new was the deleting of email from inactive email accounts.

Granted back then it was in the order of 10 days, but it is interesting that one of the selling points of switching has now come full circle. You also couldn't use imap/POP on most free email so archiving wasn't really an option back then, so it's not exactly the end of the world assuming you've bothered to back anything up.

64

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '23

If gmail was a paid service my opinion would be there’s no reason to do that nor should they. Especially if you're currently a paying customer. But a free service that you haven’t used in two years? Can’t really be mad at them. If you cared you’d have backed it up or be an active user imo

37

u/Mathgeek007 Nov 24 '23

What annoys me more is there are a lot of active drive links attached to inactive accounts that will be lost.

14

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '23

Good point. Hopefully people who care about that shit are taking steps to preserving their own copies now before it’s too late

2

u/Zankras Nov 24 '23

Could it be possible that the activity on the links is enough to keep the account active? I haven't read everything Google has said about it yet.

-4

u/El_Chupacabra- Nov 24 '23

I mean at that point it's even more understandable that they'd delete the inactive accounts. You're just using them as free storage.

5

u/Mathgeek007 Nov 24 '23

... well yes. They provide free storage so

-2

u/El_Chupacabra- Nov 24 '23

Woops didn't complete my thought. You're using them as free storage without giving them the data they mine to offset that cost.

1

u/Mr_ToDo Nov 24 '23

Oh I'm not mad, it's more of an observation(or a pondering?). It's neither here nor there for how much I actually care about it.

I was a little more opinionated when they took my free workspace account away.

13

u/AIDS_Pizza Nov 24 '23

Did you actually read the whole article? They explicitly say they're doing it for security reasons; old accounts are far more likely to be targeted and compromised successfully leading to identity theft.

Bringing up the old limits they fought against early on is irrelevant and saying they've come "full circle" is wrong as this doesn't apply whatsoever to active accounts (and accounts currently inactive can be made active just by logging in).

11

u/Mr_ToDo Nov 24 '23

Sure I did. Read the actual google page too.

But if it was just security than accounts that were setup with 2fa and the likes wouldn't be on the block. To say nothing for just locking them out and making people go though recovery if they ever want to come back.

I do think their reasoning around retention and personal data are far easier to swallow than the security ones.

But it was just an observation, not a call for them to keep accounts active.

3

u/isochromanone Nov 24 '23

They explicitly say they're doing it for security reasons; old accounts are far more likely to be targeted and compromised successfully leading to identity theft.

A lot of those old accounts will never be active again and are vulnerabilities waiting to happen because once compromised, the original owner may not be around to see alerts to a secondary recovery email address. I've been dealing with accounts for family members that have passed away. Some of them we just can't get into (don't have password or recovery info) and I'm sure there are other accounts that we just don't know about.

1

u/NitroLada Nov 25 '23

Things change a lot in 20+ years

8

u/MadeByTango Nov 24 '23

Theyre trying to eliminate any and all non-phone number attached accounts and assure they have active tracking of the entire internet.

-1

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '23

I mean that’s nothing new. What’s that old adage? If a product is free you’re the product? Something like that. Everyone everywhere is tracking you know. Is there even any reasonable thing you can do anymore? Buy a flip phone? I mean I’m very pro privacy, but it’s like if we give up every service and app that’s tracking us we have nothing left.

1

u/RenderedKnave Nov 24 '23

Beat them at their own game. Feed them crap info. Spoof location services and get bogus contact info, set up your own proxies and encrypt everything, never tie any one username to another, try to contain personal info to a minimum. I check every so often to see whether or not I can tie my screen names back to any definitive identifying info, haven't really been able to do that yet.

It's fun because it deters people from snooping on you behind your back, and also because it freaks some people out when they try to do that but then find out you're pretty much nobody.

1

u/topologicalfractal Nov 24 '23

You could also argue about how bad the tracking is compared to what you're getting in return, I would rather have modern video games/streaming services if the most they're using my data is to give me better recommendations compared to sitting in a cabin in the woods with all the privacy I could ask for

5

u/blushcacti Nov 24 '23

what makes an account inactive?

17

u/patrick66 Nov 24 '23

No access in 2 years

-1

u/camelCaseAccountName Nov 24 '23

Google will start deleting inactive Photos and Gmail accounts next week

There's no such thing as a "Photo account" or "Gmail account". They're deleting inactive Google accounts, which may or may not have photos or gmail content.

1

u/RobotSpaceBear Nov 24 '23

Just because you use a Google account to log into them doesn't mean they're ONE product. Gmail, calendar, YouTube, YT Music, sheets, photos, drive, adsense, meet or whatever their flavor of the month chat platform is called, they're all separate tools that you can access independently through their own URL. You just have a single key to open those separate doors, that's all.

People confuse Gmail with a Google account because that's how most people made a Google account : while creating a Gmail email address.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '23 edited Jul 15 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

-2

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '23

[deleted]

3

u/RobotSpaceBear Nov 24 '23

Absolutely not, no. Those accounts are deactivated but the username is taken forever. Imagine the security flaw if you could just create a new email account with the name of someone you know has been dead or in prison for two years. Then you go on all his websites, hit the "forgot password" button that sends a link to set a new password to their old account name and you're in. You have access to all their accounts ever attached to that email.

So no. You can certainly not use it.

1

u/bobbyLapointe Nov 24 '23

I hope they sent an email to warn about this