Updating our inactive account policies

I'm seeing a lot of criticism here in the comments, but what's the alternative for free accounts? If you're not using it, how long is Google (a for-profit company) supposed to hold onto your data for free? 100 years? 50 years? 15 years?

2 years seems pretty reasonable to me for something provided by a for-profit corporation. And as other reporting has noted, they're not deleting YouTube videos (makes sense, since while nobody else views your e-mails, public videos are public).

People here are saying, what about if you go to jail for more than 2 years, or you're in poor health for multi-year stretches? Then pay for a cheap Google One subscription, export your data with Takeout, or have a trusted friend log in once a year. These are lots of options.

If this were a government-provided service then it would be one thing. But it's not, it's a for-profit company that gives you free products in exchange for ads. There are lots of options for keeping an account active. I see no reason why we should expect a company to keep providing storage for dormant accounts beyond 2 years though.

>and I'd be able to convince them to give me an authentication code

Unless you got to know them well (as in personally face to face), a stranger asking for a 2fa code would appear to be an elaborate phishing campaign.

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> You make it sound like the only possible motivation a person might have to start such a business would be to exploit the incarcerated.

Initial motivations are irrelevant. At some point, the motivations of a business reduce to "make money", and anyone or anything that gets in the way of that doesn't matter, including your ethics and initial motivations.

There are lots of innocuous reasons why that happens. For example, you believe your business is doing good, right? So your business has to survive to keep doing good. And you need to make money to survive. So surely it's okay if you make it easy to pay for your service while you're in jail, perhaps by making deals with prisons to allow them to sign up in prison. Hm, that didn't work, prisons aren't doing it. Perhaps you can give prisons a cut of the sales for the service. And voila, now you're profiting from slave labor because the prisons just automatically deduct it from prisoner's pay, which is already below minimum wage, for work they can't opt out of. Of course you don't know that, so you hire 10 employees with your sudden influx of money and start expanding sales to more prison systems. And then you find out that your income stream is... not perfect, but now you've got a responsibility to your employees. McDonalds and JCrew do it, you're not doing anything worse than anyone else. And it's not exactly slavery--they're paid $1/hour (nevermind that a tampon in the commissary is $20). You're practically paying them, just with a service rather than money, right? And your business is doing good, so you have to do this, even if it's not perfect, so your business can survive and continue to do good!

The thing end-stage capitalist circles can't or won't understand is that if it's not this compromise, it's some other compromise or set of compromises. In any individual situation, doing good and making money might be compatible or incompatible, but there's only so many of those situations where you can choose good over money before your competitor knocks you out of the market.

"When you sit down in the studio to make money, God leaves the room." -Quincy Jones