Google will delete your account if you don’t use it for two years
I have a couple of spare Google accounts I used for old testing, and I’ve been getting emails recently threatening to delete them if I don’t log in. (It’s fine; they were throwaway accounts that have nothing I care about in them.)
Here’s a final email I got from Google today:
Your Google Account is being deleted
Your Google Account [name]@gmail.com is being deleted because it hasn’t been used within a 2-year period.
Learn more about the Inactive Google Account Policy.
This final email continues “Your Google Account may still be recoverable” and gives me a link to the account recovery page – but if I don’t do anything, the account will be permanently deleted in another six months.
It comes a month after another email I got with the subject line “Urgent: Sign in to your Google Account if you want to keep it”.
The Inactive Google Account Policy is pretty concise; here are the key points:
- If you don’t use a Google Account for two years, Google will mark it as “inactive” and then delete it
- This only applies to personal accounts; it doesn’t apply to anything for work or school
- There are lots of things you can do to keep an account active – basically interacting with any Google services while logged in
- Before they delete your account, Google will email both the account and your recovery email (the latter is why I’ve been getting messages)
At the bottom of the page, this item caught my eye:
If you want to put a hold on your account
You can temporarily suspend your Google Account. You might want to suspend your account during military tours of duty, prison sentences, religious pilgrimage, and so on.
The “Learn more” link takes you to an “Inactive Account Manager” page which doesn’t really match this text. It allows you to tell Google what to do if your Google Account is inactive for a fixed period of time – say, email a trusted friend if you don’t log in for three months. I didn’t explore that page more because I don’t actually want to set that up for my account.
I don’t have a strong or well-developed opinion on this, I just thought it was interesting.
What to do with unused or dormant online accounts is only going to become a bigger question; what should we do when our users die? I’ve only thought about this a little for work, and I’m just writing it down here so I can remember it the next time I consider this question.