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Google is deleting inactive accounts. Here's what that means
- eimrine 3y agoIt is a shame I can not rely on e-mail anymore as a second factor for totally any website, because what is following next is a phone number as a required second factor.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoPhones became wallets except we don't control them.
- archsurface 3y agoWith digital id, a dystopian nightmare.
- manderley 3y agoWhat's so dystopian about it? Is this just the weird Anglo-Saxon cultural thing of ID cards being way worse than passports and state IDs for incomprehensible reasons?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoI don't think IDs are dystopian but having so much of our identity and information inside expensive closed-source surveillance devices is somewhat dystopian. The happy path works great but the failure modes are a pain in the ass and it's part of why people lose their shit over lost/broken/stolen phones.
- oceanplexian 3y agoBecause of the app wants to “un-person” you all they have to do, intentionally or unintentionally is set a flag in a database and now you cease to have an identity.
- proactivesvcs 3y agoBecause increasingly, we don't own or control our phones. Carriers can push any software they like to it, or can be compelled to. Operating system vendors can add, remove or edit features that can restrict our freedoms or for pernicious purposes. App developers have had free reign over tracking our use, despite changes to the rules from big app stores. Simply viewing an image or opening an SMS can trigger a remote code execution, giving our device to an attacker who never knew us, saw us, or targetted us. Everything in your wallet is yours, it doesn't change unless you make the change. No-one can decide what the contents do or what they are, how they watch you or report your behaviour. The contents of a wallet are free.
- thfuran 3y ago>Because increasingly, we don't own or control our phones. Carriers can push any software they like to it, or can be compelled to. Operating system vendors can add, remove or edit features that can restrict our freedoms or for pernicious purposes. App developers have had free reign over tracking our use, despite changes to the rules from big app stores. Simply viewing an image or opening an SMS can trigger a remote code execution, giving our device to an attacker who never knew us, saw us, or targetted us. None of that seems to have anything to do with a digital ID.
- proactivesvcs 3y agoMy understanding of this thread is that it's about phones being our digital IDs, except we don't control them.
- 2devnull 3y agoIf you get thrown into the pool with a wallet in your pocket, no big deal. With a cellphone, it’s a $current_iphone_price loss.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoEven if phones were $0 people would be upset because it's all the passwords, accounts, login credentials, second factor, photos (are they backed up!?), call history, etc. Too much is tied up in these things.
- fshr 3y agoiPhones are IP68 water resistant.
- lifestyleguru 3y agoThey're too expensive and stuff on them too important to test that feature. Apple marketing claims they are, so... Anyway I think most of the cases when iphone falls into the water is when it sinks in it forever.
- eimrine 3y agoOnly before the first battery change.
- 2devnull 3y agoDystopia cancelled. /s Ip68 is a mere 1.5 meters! It’s still a dystopia until we get iso6425.
- fshr 3y agoMaybe you're right, but Apple says the iPhone 15 Pro is safe in up to 6 meters of water for up to 30 minutes
- lifestyleguru 3y agoWallet with plastic cards inside is pretty much guaranteed to survive falling on a concrete floor.
- firecall 3y agoThis month in Australia the second largest Telco went down for a day. Then the next day I read a report on how they’d just dished out someone’s existing mobile number to a new customer! The same number now registered twice on the network. Mobile numbers as auth are a disaster. A convenient disaster however.
- bonton89 3y agoMobile numbers are the obvious choice for large tech companies. They provide a pretty good user identifier for tracking and advertising purposes. And they allow outsourcing the hard parts of verifying a user to some one else. It isn't much wonder why they went this route and usually fall back to it even if you've setup something else.
- whatamidoingyo 3y agoYeah. The worst thing to happen is if you get a new phone with a new number. Oh my. I was locked out of so many accounts, including my bank account. It's not easy to reset a phone number you no longer have access to.
- eimrine 3y ago> It's not easy to reset a phone number you no longer have access to. Just call the police.
- donmcronald 3y ago> If you want to keep photos from your Google Drive, for example, it's best to sign in to that particular service. > That's because the tech company says it "reserves the right to delete data in a product if you are inactive in that product for at least two years. This is determined based on each product's inactivity policies." Put all your data in "the cloud", give up control, and be subjected to the whims of big tech. It would be cool to know when the above was sneaked in to the ToS. As a normal person, I'm getting pretty sick of the deal changing every day. I can run my own server for everything (and do), but most people I know can't because the tech industry refuses to build anything decent that "just works" locally. As for the above quote, every photo should be governed by the ToS that was active when the photo was uploaded. Adhesive ToS strategies should be illegal.
- marcinzm 3y agoFeels to me that the upkeep effort of a local server is more than the upkeep effort of logging into a service once every year.
- Arnt 3y agoGP is basically saying that the upkeep of a local server should be less than it is. And that if server upkeep isn't as easy as it should be, that's because the people whose duty it is to provide that have shirked their duty, and they are to blame. Personally I'm happy that he doesn't include me in the set of shirkers to be blamed.
- hospitalJail 3y agoI just checked my local network website, I started running it in 2021, but havent touched it since mid 2022. I might have checked to see if the computer(raspi4) is on since then, I can't remember why I would have done this, maybe to show a friend. Somehow not only is the computer still on(How? shouldnt a power outage have turned this off at some point?), but the server still is working perfectly. I genuinely don't understand, but its recording sound and temp data as we speak. To be fair, I did mess around in 2021 to ensure things were robust since I was working on an Embedded project at the time.
- est 3y agoIt's sad. There are some blogspot owner who are in jail (like for political or religion reasons), they can't access Google so their blog and accounts might get deleted forever.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoThe account will be deleted but hopefully ArchiveTeam grabs the blogspot in time. Please consider running a Warrior instance. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38421162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38421162 https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/blogger-grab https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/blogger-grab https://tracker.archiveteam.org/blogger/ https://tracker.archiveteam.org/blogger/
- anuraaga 3y agoMost people in jail will have lost much more than just a blog. We really need to have some more perspective here, memories of when sites just disappeared completely all the time may help though.
- est 3y agoI mean it's much, much more than some random guy's personal daily life blog It's cultural movement and social discourse, memory of many that's been lost.
- al_borland 3y agoI’m rather annoyed that Google has locked accounts behind phone based 2FA, before this move. Tie your phone number to all your accounts, or they get deleted.
- liotier 3y agoI suspect that the reason for WhatsApp, Signal, Google & co's insistence on requiring a legacy phone number for account creation is that linking it to the user's profile is the easiest and cheapest way to associate it to an individual person for legal compliance, linking it to a national jurisdiction.
- orangepurple 3y agoProbably makes your information easier to query in XKEYSCORE
- kyrra 3y agoYes it helps with KYC, but it also helps with fake accounts. People/groups that want to do fraudulent activity on Google have many of pre-created accounts to do their various schemes. It likely helps limit that. Plus, if an account is associated with a phone number, it will help with account takeover issues.
- the8472 3y agowe need the equivalent of ipv6 privacy extensions for phone numbers
- bonton89 3y agoI'm not sure how long that would last. Services already typically block anything that isn't a mobile number for sign ups. Sometimes they even block pre-paid mobile numbers.
- lapsis_beeftech 3y agoIt is more like phone based 1FA at this point. My Google account cannot be recovered at all even though I know the password and still control the recovery e-mail because at one point I made the mistake of adding a (now inaccessible) phone number.
- beeboobaa 3y agoI feel like this move by google is incredilby irresponsible. Imagine the amount of people who used gmail to sign up for third party websites whose accounts can now be compromised via password reset.
- davchana 3y agodo you imply that once google deletes an account, somebody else can sign up for that gmail account, and thus may gain access to 3rd party websites? I don't think google allows username recycling. once deleted, it remains unavailable.
- beeboobaa 3y ago> I don't think google allows username recycling. once deleted, it remains unavailable. I was under the impression they would. If not what's the point?
- Arnt 3y agoGetting rid of accounts that can be used to attack you and that you'd forgotten that you had.
- watson 3y agoThey want to close accounts with poor security (i.e. no 2FA enabled). These accounts has a higher risk of being compromised and used to get access to whatever they control
- davchana 3y agoyeah, correct. although no one will be able to find (at least easily) that which account or accounts were closed.
- shultays 3y agoSaving space and removing hassle of managing data that is not being used (and likely will never be used)? I think 18 months is way too little but I think the decision is valid
- Lutzb 3y agoSo old youtube channels will also be affected by this?
- newscracker 3y agoWith increasing backlash and criticism, I’m guessing that Google will be forced to backtrack on this and provide more leniency, just like it had on the legacy (free) Google Workspace accounts. > You'll have to take an extra step if you want to hold on to content from a specific product that you haven't used in some time. If you want to keep photos from your Google Drive, for example, it's best to sign in to that particular service. > That's because the tech company says it "reserves the right to delete data in a product if you are inactive in that product for at least two years. This is determined based on each product's inactivity policies." I fail to understand why one needs to access every service on the platform to avoid losing data. All of them are tied to one Google account. Logging in to one (like Gmail) should ensure that Google Drive data shouldn’t be deleted. This is just stupid policy! Large companies offering ad-supported “free” products cannot and must not be trusted. If you have some money and time, you can choose a different provider for email. Pick from (in no particular order) runbox.com, posteo.de, mailbox.org or mailfence.com. They’re quite cheap compared to other popular paid email providers and also support IMAP so that you can own your data and migrate if needed. If you need a lot of mailboxes for a fixed price, you can try migadu.com or mxroute.com (the latter hosts data in the U.S.). For other services, the migration path is either complex and/or costly or impossible. Still, moving out should be explored.
- jsnell 3y ago> I fail to understand why one needs to access every service on the platform to avoid losing data. One doesn't. That's just NPR's insane interpretation of "reserving a right" meaning that your data is definitely going to be deleted on a per-service basis. If they ever started actually doing it, there would be multiple notifications over months if not years about "your data in service X will be deleted unless you do Y".
- pseudalopex 3y ago> That's just NPR's insane interpretation of "reserving a right" meaning that your data is definitely going to be deleted on a per-service basis. NPR did not say or imply this. > just NPR's insane interpretation of "reserving a right" meaning that your data is definitely going to be deleted on a per-service basis. If they ever started actually doing it, there would be multiple notifications over months if not years about "your data in service X will be deleted unless you do Y". Where did Google state this?
- globalnode 3y agoah well gmail is dead to me
- hn8305823 3y agoI heard a warning on the radio this morning that "Google is going to delete your account, here's what you need to know blah blah blah" One silver lining of this is that non-tech people are becoming aware of the arbitrary and capricious nature of policies at Google.
- jeffbee 3y agoArbitrary and capricious? Windows Live deletes inactive accounts, including their Hotmail, after less than a year. ICloud deletes them after exactly one year and only 30 days' notice.
- jsnell 3y agoHaving a specific and documented policy is pretty much the opposite of arbitrary and capricious.
- cowpig 3y ago> If an account hasn't been used for an extended period of time, it is more likely to be compromised. Oh right, let's prevent a minority of people losing their accounts by making 100% of them lose their accounts.
- timbit42 3y agoIf it hasn't been used, I would suggest it hasn't been compromised. If it wasn't used for 10 years and suddenly became active, then I would suspect it has just been compromised.
- spirit557 3y agoThis article makes it seem like they are starting to delete them asap but the sign in warnings I am getting are that deletion is not happening until later 2024. So I have almost a 1 year time to sign in or try to recover the account. I have forgotten accounts popping up left and right in my gmail. And Ive also been recovering a bunch of accounts that spammers or bots managed to create using my emails as recovery addresses - that are now getting sign in warnings. Ive been able to take over those too.
- out_of_protocol 3y agoI can't sign into one of my accounts without providing a phone number "for security reasons". Account is alive so far and useful (email forwarding works).
- 1970-01-01 3y agoIts overdue. I can remember back in the mid-2000s people were creating throwaway GMail accounts. Nothing lasts forever.
- rngname22 3y agoWhat's the chance this is some necessary legal step Google has to take to meet an unintended consequence of new regulation like Digital Services Act?
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoWhen your "mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," it feels deceitful & dishonest & shitty to go out and delete a good fraction of that information. There's so much unintentional data loss here, people who are going to be so sad and mad. The shared photos grandma sent us a decade ago will all just die. Those of us tending deceased accounts will have to forever juggle a yearly ritual of carefully logging in to all relevant services. Eventuslly time will win and Google will delete the enduring digital part of our family trees. This is such a monstrous shitty awful turn. So far the Google graveyard has largely been Google projects. It's such a darker more bitter twist to me that Google is trying to put some of the enduring surviving bits of grandma in the grave too. What an wretched twist from 2023.