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An update to storage policies across your Google Account
- bird_monster 6y agoDelete? Or just make it unavailable to you? If delete, sign me up.
- tartoran 6y agoThat's a good point. I think google doesn't delete anything unless the law forces them to do so.
- jefftk 6y agoThat's not correct. If you delete things they are actually deleted, though it does take a few months to be gone from everywhere. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19965615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19965615, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12980863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12980863, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19809320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19809320, etc) (Disclosure: I work for google, speaking only for myself)
- bird_monster 6y agoI wouldn't believe that Google deletes data even if they wrote it in stone.
- tartoran 6y agoI believe what you say that it gets deleted. What I am not sure is whether it gets copied somewhere else for long term storage or some data mining, thing that you may not be aware of. I doubt you know everything that happens at google but I might be wrong there as I don't know who exactly is that I am talking to. Regardless, google has lost my trust completely and am not sure if it is possible to recover it and go back to the "do no evil stage" anymore.
- bird_monster 6y agoYeah - I believe this person believes that a set of data in its original state gets full-deleted. I do not believe that that data, in all of its forms, gets deleted from all of its storage locations. I'd hazard a guess that Google doesn't even have the ability to know whether it's been fully deleted across all of its storage locations even if they wanted to.
- pmiller2 6y agoI get where you're coming from, but isn't 2 years an awful long time for Google to have to use your data the way Google, and Google alone chooses, even if "delete" really means "delete"?
- bird_monster 6y agoMy statement is more about what I would _like_. Meaning, if Google is saying 'If you stop using google products, 2 years later we will full delete all of your data', I would spot using them today, right now. If there is grey area, I probably wouldn't/don't care, because what can I really do?
- bagacrap 6y agoyou can manually delete your account and all data, today, and Google will actually delete everything much sooner than two years from now. You can also set your account to auto delete n months after it becomes inactive.
- bird_monster 6y agoFull delete? No copies or derivations? No anonymized versions? No subsidiaries?
- rektide 6y agoI used to tell my relatives to use Google Photos, so we wouldn't all lose their photos. I no longer tell them to use Google Photos. Edit: Some of my relatives are growing old. There's a lot of talk of backups & storage. But none of that is going to preserve the digital memories we have shared, after they die. All the old URLs that have been shared will, not rot & wither, but one day just up and vanish. Up to the big log-off in the sky. I really thought a dozen GB of storage from Google to each individual in the world was pretty reasonable. That there is plenty enough resources. But no, in to the garbage file society goes. Throw out all the past. It was the promise, but it's not sound business.
- 0_____0 6y agoi've been meaning to buy a pro-quality photo printer... had the idea to host a party where people can pitch in for materials and i could print all our photos on nice archival paper and we'd spend an evening scrapbooking
- jefftk 6y agoIf you just want the photos printed, a printing service will be much cheaper. You're paying a lot for the privilege of being able to print high quality photos in your own home.
- rektide 6y agoYou're not paying a lot if you manage to use your printer well! O_______O's approach is based on a model of plenty, of trying to provide & share the production means they equip themselves with. It's good for others, & it encourages one to continue to reap the benefit of the investment, by continually printing photos. Marginal cost ought keep lowering for years & years.
- thisgoodlife 6y agoNo matter which service provider you choose, always backup your important data. Simply changing service providers won't make your data safe.
- dataflow 6y ago> "If you're over your storage limit for two years, Google may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos," the company said. That's different from just deleting all your data because you're inactive. Which is it? Edit: it seems both. Here's the blog post (maybe this is a better link): https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/ https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sam1r 6y agoCurious if one would even receive the notification emails prior to content deletion. Once you hit the 15gb limit, you stop receiving emails within 24 hours. 2 years is plenty time versus "Hey. You are out of storage. In 24 hours, we're cutting off communication." [1] [1] https://imgur.com/a/fBrlu4t https://imgur.com/a/fBrlu4t
- jeffbee 6y agoThe one time I ran out of quota in Gmail, because Google backup for MacOS has a serious bug, I did not receive the notice because the same batch job that disables delivery for your account is the one that sends you the email. I didn’t get the message until a week later when I figured it out and deleted some photos. Pretty dumb. Also, Gmail delivers an in-band message about your quota, but not in Inbox, Inbox for iOS, nor the Gmail app for iOS nor Gmail for mobile web. ONLY Gmail classic for desktop web. So I didn’t get those banners, either. In other words I still find this quota system difficult to use despite the fact that I was the tech lead of Gmail delivery SRE for years.
- geek_at 6y agooh damn. I've created an account for my newborn son on my (free) google workspace domain and send him emails every few weeks with updates and photos. He'll receive the account when he's like 12. Will these be deleted too?
- 6y ago
- sorenjan 6y agoFrom the email I got from Google a few minutes ago: > Summary of the new policies (effective June 1, 2021): > • If you're inactive for 2 years (24 months) in Gmail, Drive or Photos, we may delete the content in the product(s) in which you're inactive. Google One members who are within their storage quota and in good-standing will not be impacted by this new inactive policy. > • If you exceed your storage limit for 2 years, we may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos. Is Google running out of storage?
- jonatron 6y agoSomeone probably just ran the numbers and said we'd save X if we delete inactive users and users of the limit.
- dash2 6y agoI think it's more like "we'd make X if we can push enough users to pay for a subscription". Unlikely that Google can't afford a few exabytes of memory.
- tempest_ 6y agoNah, the data has already been harvested and used so it isn't worth storing it anymore (except to you of course).
- hated 6y agoHistorical data probably isn't as rich in detail as the new stuff they are collecting. I bet the old data is too coarse grained to be effectively joined across a variety of newer data tracking sources.
- kllrnohj 6y agoIf the users are inactive they aren't seeing ads. Google isn't a charity, why would they pay for storage that isn't being used? Also, somewhat morbidly, dead people don't really need their photos and emails hosted perpetually.
- 6y ago
- fhrow4484 6y agoThe same happened to my old "...@hotmail.com" email, Microsoft deleted old childhood emails, still bitter about that. Per https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail-orestoremail/all-emails-from-my-hotmail-account-is-purged-what/627fea66-56c5-43eb-9cab-332d31c100ee https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail... , the limit is 365 days of inactivity.
- vecinu 6y agoLikewise, so many amazing memories lost. I wish I could look back to how naive and childish I was at the beginning of my time online.
- Alex3917 6y ago> I wish I could look back to how naive and childish I was at the beginning of my time online. This is the video that comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoUrLbHg5z4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoUrLbHg5z4
- ghaff 6y agoTo give a little perspective, I basically don't have any pre-Yahoo/Google email history. So maybe going back 20 years or so and not much in the way of digital archives before about 10 years before that. Essentially nothing from BBS days, email on various proprietary systems, etc. Some shards here and there from the 1980s and a few things that were digitized prior. I'm not sure if it's good or bad (probably a bit of both) that much of my early time online is largely gone--and I didn't have a significant time "online" before I was about 20 or so.
- kelnos 6y agoI have email from when I got my college email address in the late 90s, but I still can't find email from earlier, when I had a couple different addresses that I'd gotten from my local dial-up ISP. I was always -- even then, when hard drive space was expensive -- pretty good about keeping old data as I moved from machine to machine, so it really bums me out that I can't find that old stuff.
- olliej 6y agoI mean it seems reasonable for Google to expunge inactive accounts, but does this mean not using your account (damn near unavoidable these days, esp. with chrome wanting it), or is just not using photos/gmail sufficient?
- kelchm 6y agoHeadline seems inaccurate/ misleading to me. Quote from Google in the article: > If you're over your storage limit for two years, Google may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos Honestly that seems far more generous than I’d expect — why should Google (or any other company) be expected to store your data indefinitely if you stop paying them?
- nashashmi 6y agoBecause we got used to that. They trained us to be this way. It’s their fault. Why did they have to give us free stuff and then take it away? It’s not fair. It’s been free as air. Not free as water. /rant.
- xiphias2 6y agoBecause the reason I signed up for GMail in 2004 was that they promised that they keep my emails forever
- gubby 6y agoObligatory: https://xkcd.com/1150/ https://xkcd.com/1150/
- brnt 6y agoThey promised 1GB, had a counter that slowly increased and thens settled at 15GB, as I remember.
- xiphias2 6y agoSure, but I’m right now paying for 1TB space, and I can easily forget for example if a credit card expires. Google makes enough money from my subscriptions to at least write my data to a tape when I stop paying, so that I can access it again even 10 years later when I start paying again.
- Thaxll 6y agoForget and never logged into an account for 2 years? If you don't need to log into an email account for 2 years you don't need the data.
- limeblack 6y agoWhen do the deactivate accounts then? I have had 2 at least deactivated had to connect them all together with a phone number.
- afterburner 6y ago... Promise?
- chadlavi 6y agoso if I have registered MyChildsFullName @ gmail to prevent anyone else from taking it, I now need to make sure it gets at least one email every couple years to prevent them from deleting it before my child is old enough to use it?
- agilebyte 6y agoWho are you trying to prevent from taking the handle? Seems like it's either a) adults - that have a legit use for it now, b) soon to be adults that will have a legit use for it sooner than your kid does.
- chadlavi 6y agoIt's a very unique name combination, no one else on earth would have a legitimate use for it. It's more a matter of just making sure I own and control it so I can give it to them later. I'm thinking more of a situation with spammers/scammers registering the address or something.
- screamingninja 6y ago> it gets at least one email every couple years Receiving emails does not seem to have anything to do with it. You need to login once every two years.
- tomc1985 6y agoThere are a lot of mailing list and spam operators that wouldn't mind helping you out with that
- didip 6y agoSo, is there a cloud email backup service? I had this happen to my hotmail and that sucked.
- nix23 6y agoWhy are you waiting until that backup service goes bankrupt? Buy a HD and backup your stuff at home.
- hkt 6y agoWhy not just.. pay for an email account? There are lots of community oriented providers which don't just kill off accounts in this way and are generally pretty cheap. See sdf.org and webarchitects.coop, both of which are membership based and reasonably priced. (Disclaimer: I'm a member of both)
- GekkePrutser 6y agoI thought SDF was even free? I never used it myself but I know of it. Also to be honest: If you're not even going to log into your email for 2 years, why bother even paying for it? :)
- hkt 6y agoSDF does have a free account yeah. Also a lifetime membership, but the quarterly one is amazing value for money.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoOh yeah I saw, when I wrote that I actually doublechecked but I didn't see any mention in their FAQ. But I see it now on the signup page. It's indeed excellent, I might sign up myself. I do have VPSes of course, but I like the concept.
- jamesfe 6y agoWhat's another good email provider? I am starting to feel really nervous about storing my life in Google. It's not that I wouldn't pay for these things...it's just that I worry one day I'll lose access and fall into the pit of "trying to get Google to help a single human regain access" that sounds horrible.
- izacus 6y agoFastMail / ProtonMail are good. But even they won't just store your mail forever for free.
- jamesfe 6y agoI'd pay. But mostly, I'd pay to know the customer service would respond to me. Customer service at Google is like trying to cancel Verizon service - endless transfers.
- owenmarshall 6y ago“If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” :) FWIW I’ve contacted Fastmail’s support once and they were excellent: they helped through a funny DNS issue that was my own doing within an hour of contacting them, and didn’t bat an eye at the question. It was one of the few times I’ve contacted support and thought “this person knows what I’m trying to do, why I messed it up, and how to fix it” at a deep level. They’ve either made great runbooks or hire great people, but the result is the same.
- thekyle 6y agoIf you pay for Google One they have live chat and email support. Usually I think they also have phone support but not currently due to COVID. https://i.imgur.com/cXeu1HB.png https://i.imgur.com/cXeu1HB.png
- gravitas 6y agoI chose FastMail + domain (standard plan, one user) after spending way too long weighing all the provider options this year; so far it's been great for me (email only, files/data went elsewhere). The hardest part is dealing with all the websites who (a) don't let you change your email, (b) require you to contact Support to change your email, or (c) break when you try to change your email. FastMail migrated everything (contacts too) from GMail with one click and set up an IMAP poller against it while you work on the long road to convert. $0.02 Edit: just to cover my bases, a 10-year registration of the domain was < $100 USD at Namesilo.
- therealmarv 6y agoNever get in captivity without Internet access for more than 2 years ;)
- bagacrap 6y agosuch as prison
- therealmarv 6y agoI had more in mind things like "Cast Away" or poor souls who were held in captivity in a remote foreign country by the government there or local pirates or terrorists. When you return to "normal" life you even loose your email, photos and everything just because you could not log in for 2 years :(
- saalweachter 6y agoMight be a blessing at that point. I'm damm near in a cold sweat thinking about how bad my email backlog would be after two years.
- noodles_nomore 6y agoFuture headline: I was captured as a sex slave for two years and when I finally sneaked internet access Google had deleted all my contacts
- pan69 6y agoWhat about Gmail accounts that forward email to another account? It's an account that is actively used but I never log into such account.
- modeless 6y agoGood question. I'd be fine if that account stopped storing mail as long as the forwarding kept working.
- oconnore 6y agoI have this and have been unable to login since 2015 with no ability to recover my account (I know the password, but it's flagged as "unrecognized device"). I also can't turn it off or delete the account.
- simias 6y agoI do the same thing but I think it's all the same for Google, if you don't actively log into Gmail they can't know for sure that it's still being used. We'll just have to remember to log into the service once every other year. I hope they'll bother to send a warning email at least.
- bpodgursky 6y agoSort of an interesting related question around privacy policy updates maybe? If a user hasn't interacted with your platform in multiple years, it becomes hard to validate that they've consented to any data-use changes you push out.
- gtirloni 6y agoThese posts bashing Google are getting tiring. No sensible free email service will hold your emails forever, especially if you're not using your account. I'd invite people without knowledge of running a business to take the time and think this through before jumping in the outrage bandwagon.
- aketchum 6y agoWhile I would normally agree with you, Google has advertised unlimited, free storage forever for things like photos and email. They should not have made that promise and I understand why they are breaking the promise now, but if you break a promise it seems reasonable for people to be irate about it.
- cromwellian 6y agoAll you've got to do is log in at least once every two years and use the account so it isn't inactive. If you have data stored in an account you haven't touched for 2 years, how important is it really to you?
- swiley 6y agoThe problem is that everyone treats gmail like it's a component of internet infrastructure. When your personal emails go to your friend's spam folder regardless of how conformant and well behaved your mail server is and they think its your fault for not using gmail, that's a problem. I've had google lock me out of my account due to their bad password reset heuristic (which is a social scaling problem due to the above) which means I'll completely lose my address in a year (currently forwarded to my own domain.) There are similar social network effects with eg. Facebook, iMessage etc. although the abuses and problems are slightly different.
- lkbm 6y agoThere's nothing in this article that's bashing them. It's useful information about a policy change.
- 6y ago
- javagram 6y agoSet a reminder every 3 or 6 months to use Google Takeout. Download a full copy of your data to a hard drive in your local possession. If you’re really paranoid, download a 2nd copy and put it on a hard drive that you then leave unplugged from all computers and the internet until the next time. Simple solution for anyone with broadband, and then if you ever lost your cloud data due to subscription lapsing or inactivity you have 1-2 local copies for you or your family.
- spullara 6y agoIs there an automated version of this?
- amelius 6y agoPerhaps, if it can recognize traffic lights and crosswalks.
- jkingsman 6y agoYes, you can set a scheduled download (I think for up to six months) within takeout and specify the downloads to go to Dropbox or a couple other storage providers. As someone who does this every month, the downside is that there are often glitches in the export (which they usually catch) and you'll need to set up a new export to get them to try again. In the worst case, I've needed to re-export three times to get them to green flag it as a clean collection without any errors (which sucks when it's a couple days for them to prep it and then another while to actually download and store 300GB of data).
- spicybright 6y agoWait, what's the danger of keeping your backup on an internet connected machine?
- jkingsman 6y agoThings that communicate with the web are susceptible to malware and exploit. Offline storage of course can also suffer bit rot/theft/damage, but it erases the possibility of malicious access over the web and makes it that much more secure. Use the 3-2-1 backup method (3 instances of data, 2 of them not the original (backups), 1 of them offsite). I use cloud backup(s) for my offsite(s) and the remaining backup lends itself to being an external harddrive (or a very well firewalled NAS if it must be on the network).
- joshuakelly 6y agoThis is speculation, but I wonder if this is not the outcome of legal compliance efforts with respect to defined data retention periods in various pieces of consumer privacy legislation over the last few years. From Recital 39 of the GDPR: "This requires, in particular, ensuring that the period for which the personal data are stored is limited to a strict minimum. Personal data should be processed only if the purpose of the processing could not reasonably be fulfilled by other means. In order to ensure that the personal data are not kept longer than necessary, time limits should be established by the controller for erasure or for a periodic review." In the context of F500, I've seen compliance efforts around this that have mandated deletion in the case of inactivity for consumer applications that most people would have reasonably assumed would have been kept around even if they didn't log in. This is hinted at in the article "...to better align with common practices across the industry, the company said on Wednesday." And if we're going to take a cynical view, wouldn't it be that Google would never delete user data (the source of their revenue) unless they absolutely had to?
- tehabe 6y agoThis doesn't really apply here, this is about data which is stored by the users on the services for being stored on those services according to the ToS of Google. So, it the purpose is only expired when a user decides to delete the data.
- joshuakelly 6y agoIn general, the consumer data privacy laws in regions where Google has significant regulatory exposure do not permit indefinite data retention of PII. My speculation is that Google sees an across the board, 2-year inactivity period as the best option to mitigate regulatory exposure because a plain reading of, for example, Rec. 39 is that a maximum retention period must be defined as a policy organizationally.
- tehabe 6y agoThis is a weird interpretation of privacy law and makes no sense to me. If I upload a file to Google Drive I expect them to be there as long as I don't delete the file. You could argue, that emptying the bin after 30 days would be needed to fulfill those requirements. But having an inactive account shouldn't. These privacy laws mostly deals with all the other data Google is collecting about its users while they are using the service.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoIn a way I think this is a good thing. When someone dies their history will be cleaned up automatically. Leaving less burden on their family to clean it all up. It's a big problem nowadays, because the processes to get someone's accounts closed aren't simple at all. I wouldn't want my emails to be around forever. And while I'm alive I will definitely check it more than once a day, let alone once every 2 years :P
- rococode 6y agoYahoo Mail does the same with only a 1 year threshold and regardless of how much data you use. Don't log in for 12 months = lose everything. Sadly found this out the hard way - most of my childhood email accounts were wiped :'( Now they're also disabling email forwarding for free users which I've been relying on for a decade to catch occasionally relevant emails. Might really be forced to shell out the $3.49 a month for their paid option... I guess this is kind of inevitable with the scale of storage these kinds of companies work with. Probably someday Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. will have similar plans as the older data they store starts losing its value. https://www.ghacks.net/2020/11/05/yahoo-mail-drops-email-forwarding-option-for-free-users/ https://www.ghacks.net/2020/11/05/yahoo-mail-drops-email-for...
- maciekmm 6y agoIf you are using gmail, you probably could use "Check email from other accounts:" under "Settings / Accounts and Import". It fetches new mails periodically using POP3 or IMAP. If you host your own mail server, you could use https://www.fetchmail.info/fetchmail-man.html https://www.fetchmail.info/fetchmail-man.html instead.
- rococode 6y agoThanks for the tip! Will definitely look into how that works.
- netsharc 6y agoI've had Yahoo Mail since 1995. A year or two ago I noticed all my emails before 2001 were no longer there. Such a great service! /s I still use that e-mail for online shops, etc. (a bad idea, because I also use it for Facebook, so all the online services that uploaded their customer data onto Facebook has my details courtesy of Zuck). Nowadays Yahoo's web interface keep moaning that I should turn off my ad blocker, and as my little "Fuck you, Yahoo" I keep clicking "No"..
- reitanuki 6y agoI just yesterday set up fetchmail[1] to fetch e-mail from yahoo over POP and deposit them in a self-hosted mailbox (for my partner's longstanding Yahoo e-mail address). It may be worth a look; it can fetch from IMAP or POP and spit them out to LMTP or SMTP. (N.B. it didn't work with IMAP on Yahoo for me, but using POP was no problem). edit: Perhaps my /etc/fetchmailrc file can be a useful starting point for someone[2]. [1]: https://www.fetchmail.info/ https://www.fetchmail.info/ [2]: https://hastebin.com/raw/ororunutev https://hastebin.com/raw/ororunutev
- eplanit 6y agoWill they do it upon request, too?
- jsnell 6y agoDupe from a month ago, with multiple 300+ comment threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25060973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25060973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25060882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25060882
- johncena33 6y agoHN crowd feels like they are on a jihad against Google. Pretty much every other email provider does it. This is a free service that they are not paying. But yet they like to keep bashing on Google.
- tanilama 6y agoHonestly, the entitlement is baffling. The HN crowds hold Google accountable to exploit their data, at the same time, when Google declares their data as liability and no longer wants it, they act like cry babies. Grow up.
- roryokane 6y agoThose stories only mention Google Photos though. For those who only use some of Google’s services, it’s much more alarming to hear that the new storage policy also applies to Gmail and Drive.
- wiswindsurf 6y agoThey deleted my youtube vids. Now there is guy in California that claims he invented what was shown as an invention in one of my videos. Got $10 million in startup capital for it. Video was 2009.
- kull 6y agoThis missing ")" in the title and in the content gives me goosebumps.
- sam1r 6y agoThey stop your gmail from receiving inbound emails if you don't pay to upgrade for storage [15gb]. Within 24 hours! I just reached that, and the first alert I see on my email [1] feels quite threatening. It's like I came home, and there's an unexpected eviction on the door. IMO, this is way worse that account inactivity. Who remembers that ever-increasing ticker on the gmail homepage that advertised "Your storage with us is always growing", and it was like 10gb + the counter was increasing live. Ridiculous. [1] https://imgur.com/a/fBrlu4t https://imgur.com/a/fBrlu4t
- karmasimida 6y agoThis is reasonable. Delete some filter emails won't take you 10 minutes
- sam1r 6y agoAgreed. Just more peeved that it upon registration, this would be the last exit I would have imagined from the product. The marketing to acquire users versus to keep them is annoyingly polarizing. >> Hey! Free growing memory. Choose gmail! Look! A counter that is incrementing in the browser real-time! >> Much later... Nope. You reached the limit + we stopped your emails from coming in. Goodbye. I'm definitely on the way out, just have been lazy about it.
- dash2 6y agoIt's not that easy. I have 15 years of emails, including deeply personal stuff. I've deleted all the unread mailing lists. I've deleted the big files. I've gone through numerous social and advertising emails and mass-deleted. Yet I'm stuck on like 14.98 Gb and every time I hit the threshold, Gmail starts bugging me to do more. How can I even tell if I have that much email? They could just be saying "oh, you have 14.98Gb".
- Kye 6y agoDid you empty the trash? Trash counts. Same for Drive.
- 6y ago
- tomc1985 6y agoWow, so everyone who's in jail or going to jail will lose their accounts
- chris_wot 6y agoJust logged on and downloaded all my photos!
- zaptheimpaler 6y agoCompany giving you tons of free shit gives marginally less long lasting free shit. And its only if you're OVER the storage limit for an entire 2 years. And you can choose to pay for more storage if you'd rather keep the data. It's really not that bad... I think sometimes people hold Google to insanely high standards. They gave us so much free stuff that people get mad when they try to charge for it. Others say to move to paid services where you're the "customer not the product", but people would absolutely lose their shit if Google started charging for Gmail, Maps etc. I can't help but empathize with all the founders who warn about how difficult it is to raise prices.
- dawnerd 6y agoso kind of a problem here though. I pay for what was google g suite for the "unlimited" storage. I'm at around 13TB stored, it's mostly just backups so not really a huge deal if I lose it. The problem is there's no real way to pay them for this. The new workplace plans are vague about additional storage. I don't get why companies selling storage cant offer higher and higher plans in say 2tb chunks.
- inapis 6y agoGoogle has a slightly different problem. It has trained users into believing that shit should be free (and maybe supported by advertising) and over the years it has accumulated a significant chunk of users who either wholly believe in that mindset or are simply unable to pay for xyz reasons. Of course, people are going to raise hell when they start charging for something that was free for a decade. Google sowed the seeds on this one.
- aboringusername 6y agoThis was before the rise of the GDPR - I think it's fair to say now they are getting their teeth into tech companies Google is realizing they can't rely on the same avenues to make money - they can't use data in the same way in 2020 as they could in 2010. Cue a shift in business models as Apple et al (and probably Google itself with Android) limits what data can be accessed at any time.
- laumars 6y agoI’m often the first to criticise Google but what they’re doing here isn’t exactly unprecedented. Free online mail providers have been removing inactive users since the 90s. Cloud storage providers remove inactive free users. A lot of companies even have a far more aggressive time line (pretty sure 90s Yahoo Mail was in the region of months rather than years) so 2 years seems pretty generous to me. At the end of the day if you’re neither paying for nor even using the service, then why should they keep your account active? They have no obligation to store people’s data indefinitely at their own expense.
- lambda_obrien 6y agoSometimes you want that email address to forward somewhere because you used it for years. Maybe Google should consider allowing a permanent email forward and then more people could delete that gmail account they don't use.
- laumars 6y agoForwarding still costs Google bandwidth and storage. It’s also not a great long term solution for yourself as you’re introducing more moving parts into your content delivery that can fail. Really it should be seen as a short term strategy for deprecating old addresses rather than a solution that runs indefinitely. And that’s just good practice irrespective of Google’s retention policy.
- makomk 6y agoPart of the reason everyone switched to GMail is because, unlike the other free online mail providers, they didn't do this kind of bullshit.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoMaybe? It certainly wasn't why I switched. The gmail interface was so much cooler and faster than any of the other providers, and gmail's spam detection actually worked. The amount of storage available was nice, but I certainly gave no thought to the notion that Google would preserve my stuff indefinitely if I didn't use it.
- 7357 6y agoTangentially (is that a word?), I remember when I was sold on buying a macbook, the plastic white one, back when I was young (2009?) and innocent. I had also purchased a one year 'me' email account. Then a burglar broke into my home and stole among other things the laptop, it was around one year after the initial purchase date. And when I reacted the subscription was expired. I never could recover my hardware or my data. Good old times.
- pier25 6y agoWhat's going on at Google? They have been cutting down on storage for the past couple of months. Maybe they are bleeding storage costs?
- jeffgreco 6y agoGoogle encouraged opening a Gmail account for your kid and emailing it memories as they grow up. So now once they turn 13 and you hand over the password, it'll be deleted?
- t-writescode 6y agoYou could log in to the email account you haven't given your kid yet?
- Crash0v3rid3 6y agoThis is really not a big deal, just login to the account and you’ll be fine.
- usr1106 6y agoThat's what I thought for many services before. Some day you just don't keep up with your reminders because you will it tomorrow. And then next week. And suddenly it is too late.
- dukeofdoom 6y agoThis seems like a feature not a bad thing. But will they actually delete their copy? Seems like google sucks up all the data about you they can.
- nallo 6y agoAlways make sure you have strong single point of failure on the web. Also weigh the cost of doing local backups against that point. Also keep in mind that everything will be lost at some point..
- foxhop 6y agoDeadman switch activated. Let's just say Google doesn't delete your data they just orphan your access to the data with the assumption that you have abandoned the account, this is the great culling. All the people who have died their data must have been absorbed enough that Google doesn't think keeping the emails around is worth it. Will someone build us a way to heartbeat our Google accounts to keep them prevent them from timing out?
- phendrenad2 6y agoHmm good point, Google would never actually delete data. Goes against their whole business model of "mine a huge pool of data with ever more sophisticated ML algos and sell the results to whoever will pay".
- WalterBright 6y agoIt can be worse. I got a letter recently from a mutual fund saying I'd done nothing with my account for years, and if they didn't hear from me soon, they were going to hand it over to the government. (I'm a buy and hold, hold, hold, hold, investor.)
- actuator 6y agoWow, this seems like one of those name and shame cases. A login shouldn't be expected here.
- bacondude3 6y agoThis is actually standard practice (in the U.S.), and there are official procedures to recover unclaimed assets. See: https://www.usa.gov/unclaimed-money https://www.usa.gov/unclaimed-money
- mcovalt 6y agoThere's a great Planet Money episode I listened to recently about this. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/24/799345159/episode-967-escheat-show https://www.npr.org/2020/01/24/799345159/episode-967-escheat...
- fiberoptick 6y agoThere are state laws that require financial institutions to do this actually. Their hands are tied here. It's called "escheatment". https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answersescheathtm.html https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answersescheathtm.html
- pcurve 6y agoI can’t think of a more apt sounding term. (After theft)
- edub 6y agoif this is in the USA, it is most likely an "unclaimed property" law of their state. it isn't so much a name and shame, the company likely followed the state's policy and sent a notice to determine if the property should move to the state. but you can always file a claim for that and have the property returned. most states have a free website to search if you have any unclaimed property that the state is holding on your behalf, and then you get to fill out paperwork. i just searched for myself and I have about $80 from State Farm from 2001 and about $30 from Google from 2014. i know the state farm was a premium refund after i moved out of state and i guess they were not able to find me (although i was still with state farm in the other state, but i'm guessing in 2001 that wasn't easy for them to cross reference and possibly state farm is legally a different company in each state). no idea what the source of the Google money was, and also baffling why they couldn't find me as i've been an active customer since way before then, but also likely a scenario where one division doesn't talk to another and they still have to comply with the law.
- ilovetux 6y agoDoes anyone know what inactive means? What do I need to do to keep: gmail: receive, read and/or send photos: upload or view? etc...anything else would be appreciated.
- plasma 6y agoGoogle is tidying up all of its services to be healthier profit wise? Deleting old data, increasing ads on YouTube, ...
- godshatter 6y agoWell, I guess this is the kick in the arse I need to finish changing email addresses from gmail to my "new" email address in the approximately 9 billion websites where it exists.
- arkitaip 6y agoGood luck. I did this earlier this year and it really helped to use saved passwords in Chrome to figure out which accounts are the most important ones.
- totony 6y agoWhat if I use only imap clients? Is that considered "not logging in"? Haven't seen them address this
- LanceH 6y agoThe real statement is they will delete your data as they see fit with no explanation at all, right?
- yashap 6y agoIMO, all software should be like this. If you’re inactive for X time, they send an email letting you know your account, and all associated data, will be deleted if you don’t log back in. Probably sending a few such emails to be safe, but ensuring there’s some sort of automated inactive account cleanup. So many people have defunct accounts, filled with personal data just waiting to be hacked. I’d be totally up for legislation to enforce “must automatically delete inactive accounts”, it’d reduce the efficacy of hacking shitty old services with bad security, who are probably storing your password in plain text or md5ed.
- m1117 6y agoNeat idea to clean up the internet
- edub 6y agoi do think it is fair if it is a free service for there to be some limit for how long the data is stored. my question is, do they also delete any related metadata that they use to improve their targeted advertising in reference to me?
- judge2020 6y agohttps://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-private-information-private/ https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-priva... > As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period. No data from your uploaded content is used in targeted advertising (and there's not much metadata they could really use to target based off of that - who would target based off of "visited Google Drive every other day this week" in terms of adwords customers).
- jacobmarble 6y ago> Over the past decade, Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos have helped billions of people securely store... This writing style is hard to read any more. My eyes skip over whole paragraphs to get to the one or two sentences that really matter, then my fingers hit cmd-W out of habit.
- gavin_gee 6y agoWith the recent MS to Google hires, I would expect a lot of Microsoft like price squeezing to start happening on google services as they bring cost out of the business. The photo storage changes bring familiarity to the unlimited storage option ending on Onedrive
- CobrastanJorji 6y agoThis presents a really unfortunate new ending to the famous "Dear Sophie Lee" commercial.
- einpoklum 6y agoGoogle is a monopolistic behemoth of a company, which spies on you and profiles you up the wazoo, sharing its information with US government agencies and who knows who else. It also biases, manipulates and censors searches and recommendations on its main websites, in various contexts which have been reported here on HN. So, please try to avoid using any Google services, in particular their file storage.
- nojito 6y agoWow it seems like the effect of FB and Apple and Amazon on google’s revenue is real. They have been on a cost cutting rampage recently.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lxe 6y agoA 2TB USB 3.1 SSD drive is $200 (= 10 months of Google Drive) 500Mbps data transfer. Free from ISP or mobile data caps. Weighs an ounce and fits everywhere -- take it everywhere. No one owns or even sees the data you write to it. The whole "cloud storage" fad should go away.
- SquareWheel 6y agoThis looks like the same article that was posted a couple weeks ago.
- phendrenad2 6y agoNow is the time to pay for your stuff. Email isn't free, why do you want it for free?
- zelly 6y agoGreat idea, hopefully this helps nail the coffin on "everything should be in the cloud"
- dzonga 6y agoI have google one. but honestly, nothing beats having a 1tb external ssd. Better if you've more. The data is yours. & you can plug it any place. no need for internet connection. and you can bury those in the garden for backup.
- twothamendment 6y agoI'm glad they have a policy to deal with this scale of storage growth. I'd rather pay for Google one than see Photos RIP like so many other Google products.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fnord77 6y agonext week: Amazon announces "forever" email addresses
- NoblePublius 6y agoThe recent changes to Google Workspace effectively increased my per seat cost by 70%. Im doing 2021 budgeting now and I can save about $200/head by killing Google entirely (and Slack and Asana) and just using Microsoft 365.
- kfogel 6y agoI'd like to point out https://Permanent.org/ https://Permanent.org/, ahem. It made the front page here a while back (not posted by me), and it's relevant here: you pay a one-time payment for permanent storage -- that's right, your stuff will stay right there even if you're "inactive for 2 years". (Disclosure: My company does some consulting work for Permanent. When I received the notice today from Google of their storage policy change, I realized that the reason it sounded weird to me was that I'd gotten accustomed to Permanent's model.)
- tsjq 6y agoThat's nice. #TIL , and I visited the website. Qn. Does it allow a paid user to delete their uploaded files ?
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y agoWith profits at $160 billion in 2019 and a user base of $4 billion people, they make roughly $40 per user per year. If a 14TB hdd costs them $200/year to run, 15GB of storage would run about $.21/year. Does that sound right? If storage was that inexpensive I would think think they wouldn't be restrictive.
- minot 6y agoNot defending Google but I believe at least once Google has restored emails for a lot of users from tape backup. I imagine 15 GB for the user is at least three times as much from Google perspective. So sixty cents, not twenty?
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y agoI'm assuming Google's paying about 5x what the hdds alone cost, which I guess would cover backups, infrastructure besides the hdd cost, power, and software. But it could be more than that. 15x the cost of hdds seems high, but storage could be that expensive for them.
- jl6 6y ago4.3PB/day. A rare insight into the scale of cloud services. Amazon and Microsoft and Google generally keep extremely tight-lipped about the scale they are operating at.
- strnisa 6y agoIf you'd like to free some of that 15GB, you can bulk remove some attachments from your Gmail with Unattach. It's free and open-source: http://unattach.app/ http://unattach.app/ Full disclosure: I'm the author of Unattach.
- ishikawa 6y agoI wonder if it is legal for someone to inherit a Google account, since it is personal. The same for Amazon account or any other. Can someone inherit a Google account for the Email and Photos history, as well for books on Google Play and any other purchase? Can someone inherit a Kindle Account? Of course they can have access with user and password, but if these companies are still on the market 50 years from now I wonder if they will start deleting accounts from people supposedly with 110 years and over.
- Mikho 6y agoI guess Google needs to figure out whether it gives services for free in exchange for data collection and ads or it completely kills ads for paying customers. It shouldn't overload paying users with ads. It shouldn't display even one single ads for those who pay. But it's not the case. The sad truth is that the whole thing is not about storage. Lately Google just decided to start milking users much harder and basically torture users with insane amount of ads along with a forced movement of their data to monthly paid services like YouTube Music.
- usr1106 6y agoThey advertise this inactivity manager. The problem is you can only use it if you provide a phone number. So I guess that's a way to enforce that users have only one account (or a small number). I have a dozen accounts. I don't really use most of them a whole lot. And all but 2 of them have very small amount of data stored. I created them mostly to isolate them in their tracking, not to get a huge amount of free storage. No idea what the conditions say about multiple accounts. I don't waste my time reading them. I understand that their lawyers have spent a lot of time to reserve all rights to them and leave nothing to me. That's the price of free services.